


Transposition (The Mathématique Remix Project)

by kvikindi



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ancient Technology, Cryptography, Grief, Lucian Alliance, M/M, Music, Slow Burn, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2019-10-18 22:04:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 48
Words: 357,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17589248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: A remix/continuation of cleanwhiteroom's Mathématique.The year is 2008.Recently divorced and recovering from an injury that threatens to be career-ending, Everett Young moves across the hall from the SGC's premier cryptanalyst, Nicholas Rush.That's pretty much when his life goes off the rails.





	1. Prologue

“I think that’s the last box,” Young said, squinting into the dark hold of the U-Haul truck.

Absently, he rubbed at the back of his neck, feeling a line of cold sweat running down it. He didn’t know if the sweat was from the heat— uncharacteristic for Colorado, this late in one of its long summers— or from the pain that had settled at the base of his back, just below the belted hug of the medical brace he was still wearing.

He didn’t like the feel of the sweat. Every time it came to his attention, he flinched for about a tenth of a second, instincts kicking in and telling him that it was blood.

“You have _got_ to be kidding me,” Mitchell said. He shifted the box to one hip, easy and casual, the only sign that it was costing him effort the stretch of white cotton across his bicep. “That’s it? All your earthly possessions? Man, I swear, V, that is some sad sumbitch shit. I can talk to Emily if you want; you _always_ pull this kind of nice-guy—“

“No,” Young said. “Thanks.”

He was watching that stretch of white cotton, and the edge where the seam of it met Mitchell’s warm freckled skin. When he realized that was what he was doing, he jerked his gaze to the side of the U-Haul truck. An ad covered most of the bolted panels. It showed a big blue turtle afloat in a painted sea. SOUTH DAKOTA, the ad read, and Young was lost for a minute, trying to figure out why a turtle would be in South Dakota, which he was pretty sure was a landlocked state, until he picked up on the black bar of text telling him that South Dakota had once been part of a prehistoric seaway. That made more sense.

But he felt sad for the turtle without really knowing why. It still seemed out of place somehow, with its yellow eyes and fierce expression stuck in the middle of an ad for South Dakota. It had dignity, and he respected that about it. Sixty-five million years ago it had carved through the ancient water with its silent mouth and massive fins.

Life would be easier, Young thought, if everything was underwater. Things that were good underwater died on land.

He was startled from his reverie by Jackson slamming the driver’s side door closed. He realized that Mitchell had started towards the sort-of-salmon-colored apartment complex, and that Jackson had shut the door on purpose, probably, to get Young’s attention, because he was watching Young with an unreadable look. He had his hands shoved in his pockets, his shoulders hunched. He cleared his throat.

“Hey,” Young said.

Jackson said, “Hey.”

“I think Cam got the last box, so you wanna—?” Young jerked his thumb in the direction Mitchell had gone in.

“Yeah,” Jackson said, not moving.

“Great; you can introduce me to this math guy you want me to—“

“Listen,” Jackson said, interrupting, “are you okay? Because you seem kind of—“

He was using that Jackson-voice, the gentle reasonable one that kind of went down at the end of every sentence, like he was launching himself out of a plane and into your personal business. Young didn’t even know Jackson that well, but already he knew enough to know that voice, enough to prickle in dread at it.

“Yeah,” Young said. “I’m fine.”

“Because it’s been a rough year for you. For all of us. With the war, and the Alliance, and—”

“I’m fine,” Young said.

“You could’ve stayed on base longer. Three months is— really not a long time, with the type of injury you—“

“I know what type of injury I have.” He realized he could taste chlorine in his teeth, a taste that always reminded him of tears for some reason. He looked for the swimming pool that must be there, and found it about twenty-five meters away, a thin slice of blue beyond a stretch of neatly-kept grass. It looked like a mirage. Almost unreal.

“Right,” Jackson said. “I’m just saying, you don’t have to bounce back from this. No one’s asking you to do that. We’ve all been there, you know?”

“You’ve been there,” Young said flatly.

_Mitchell_ had been there. Mitchell had bit the ice in Antarctica, had been shot down in his F-302 and woken up in the infirmary, not sure what parts of his body still belonged to him. He’d been there when Young had woken up, too, even though they’d only ever been slap-on-the-back buddies— the second visitor, after Emily, since David was still laid up in his own hospital bed. He had slipped into Young’s life with the ease of one of the screws that now held Young’s spine together, a support that was steely, automatic, and never felt like pity.

Jackson looked down in the pause, his mouth curving in a wry and painful half-smile. “Well,” he said. “I’ve been _dead._ ”

It wasn’t the same, but Young wasn’t going to say aloud what he thought: that Jackson had gotten off easy every time; that it was the rest of them, with their worn-down, ordinary, aging bodies that held on stubbornly to every wound. Jackson always came back brand-new and scrubbed-clean. He had never had to actually _not die_ and live with it.

“I really don’t know why you’re doing this,” Young said.

Jackson regarded him quizzically. “This?”

Young gestured: the apartment complex, the sprinkler chuckling water over a bright green grass square, the parking lot and the turtle on the side of the truck. “This is what friends do.”

“We’re not friends?”

“No,” Young said. “Not really.”

Jackson smiled again and looked down, scuffing one foot against the asphalt. “Well,” he said. “Maybe I want to be your friend.”

“You’re the patron saint of the Stargate Program. You could get anybody you want to be your friend.”

“And I want you to be my friend. Is that so hard to believe?”

Young looked at him hard. “Yes,” he said.

Jackson shrugged. “I’m a friendly guy. I don’t know what to tell you.”

He wasn’t lying; not exactly, Young thought. But he wasn’t a friendly guy, and Young wasn’t his type— Jackson hung out with Carter and the astrophysicists, not with rough-and-tumble, dumb-hick flyboys who broke their backs on other planets, half-bleeding out on the volcanic sand and blinking up at the faint rings that cut the sky into two segments, till David’s taut face loomed in the near distance and said _Everett. Ever—_

Jackson said, “Maybe call it intuition.”

Young shook off an inexplicable sense of dread associated with the memory, something desolate that spread upwards from his toes till a numb feeling reached his fingertips.

The doctors had said that it was normal to be depressed.

That it wasn’t a mental thing, just part of the injury. Neurons regrowing.

“You just seem like the right person at the right time,” Jackson said. “To be my friend, or— something.”

The dread hadn’t gone away. Young looked at the painted turtle, at its fierce eyes, ten million years dead, feeling tired and sick and too heavy. “You make me sound important,” he said.

“Everyone’s important,” Jackson said, which was a typical Jackson sentiment. “The trick is just figuring out what for.”

Young said, “Is that the trick.”

He shut the back of the truck with an abrupt movement. Jackson flinched just slightly at the corner of his eye, and Young felt a mean hint of triumph. “Come on,” he said. “Better head inside before Mitchell gets some kind of bright idea about redecorating my apartment.”

“It’s not redecorating if you’re starting from nothing,” Jackson said reasonably.

Young shut his eyes briefly against the mid-afternoon sunlight, the smell of the over-green grass and the sprinkler trying to keep it alive, the chlorine— too chemical, something he could taste in his mouth— and the bright dome of the sky over the kid’s-toy marble of the Earth. The hard back of the brace felt, just for a second, like it was part of his body, something that he would never get out of again, and he was hit by the urge to pry it off, to strip off his shirt and jeans with it, to get out from under the scar tissue that was holding him together, the flesh that wasn’t his flesh, till he was left with— some other kind of body.

When he opened his eyes, he was leaning against the van, his hand spread over the turtle’s gray-green face like a muzzle. Jackson was watching him, expression unreadable.

“That’s the problem; you’re never starting from nothing,” Young said.


	2. Chapter 2

The problem wanted to be solved, Nicholas Rush reflected, which was what made it so fucking vexing.

He was lying on his back on the hardwood floor in his flat and he could feel the seams of the boards between his fingers, where the grit of years would have collected if the boards had occupied their current configuration for years, but they had not, of course; ten years ago they had been timber, and before that felled as part of a larger body from the living root system that had made them trees, but that had been in another part of the country, or— _that was in another country, and besides—_

Well— it was how America worked, nothing native to the place it was put down in, and he liked that. Everything nomadic. Everything new. The best-made floors would perhaps have no cracks where dust could settle in the truly apocalyptic case that a building was left to stand for longer than a decade, two decades, instead of being razed and built over again, but then we all have our little imperfections, don’t we. Don’t we.

His back was cold and he wondered absently about what this suggested in re: the structural properties of the building and the way that heat dissipated throughout it.

There was probably no relation between this and the problem he was facing, said problem being a piece of cyphertext that _wanted_ to be decrypted, destabilizing his previous cryptographic assumptions, which were predicated upon the goal of a cryptographic scheme being resistance to decryption, or at least resistance to decryption by anyone who did not possess a correct key, whereas the Ancients— the oh-so-glorious and elevated, ineffable, long-dead Ancients, who had seeded a thousand thousand star systems and left behind only the technological husk of their being, not even their bodies, because they were not really dead, only climbed up some ladder of existence carrying their material-bodies-made-energy with them— had clearly anticipated the existence of descendants who might crack open the elegant arch of one of the portals that the American military had agreed to call, ludicrously, stargates. Descendants who might trigger the transmission of the cyphertext that, it turned out, was concealed within each chevron like a coy and living coiled-up sentient being. Descendants who had by inheritance the right to decrypt said cyphertext, but no means of ever being granted the key. The cryptographic scheme must therefore be amenable to—

His back was cold because he was sweating. Had been sweating. Quite a lot, actually.

It was hot in the room and there was probably no relation between this and the problem he was facing, except that the previous seven cyphers, the seven he had solved in the ten months since he’d first got his eyes on the full set, or almost ten months, which he could track because it had been Bonfire Night, or would have been Bonfire Night if he hadn’t been in California, so he remembered, remembered the Fifth of November, the way he’d walked out in the garden when Gloria had gone to bed, unable to bear how the faint sound of her breathing had altered already, an alteration that perhaps no one would have noticed except him, some different overtone or the start of a syncopation that said _I am dying, I’m dying_ , and if he did not hear it, did not listen, then that would not be what it was saying.

This was how language worked, he thought.

He had stood in the garden and looked at the stars in the absence of violence, no bonfires and no rockets and no papier-mache men thrown on the flames, only the still California skyline and the tracks of airplanes, which seemed to travel like electrons at a quantum level, never moving yet appearing in position after position, and it seemed advantageous to move that way. To erase oneself from one point of existence and occupy another. He’d worried at the sleeve of his brown cardigan and thought about being burned alive, thought about numbers, thought about the dematerialization involved in David Telford’s stargate— the gate that David had shown him underneath the earth of Colorado, which would raze him down to nothingness and make for him a new body in the reaches of interstellar space.

What does it feel like, he’d wondered, what does it feel like to be burned alive, and though he had not known the answer then, probably it felt a bit like being locked in this stifling room in the center of Colorado, where he had been for five months now and still he did not know if he could describe one single characteristic feature of Colorado, only the contours of this room where he was finding it oddly difficult to breathe, as though the air had become heavy on its way to his lungs, and it occurred to him that he did not know how American air conditioning systems worked, because the sea air had come in from the coast when he lived in California, making the summers cool and breezy, and now he was very far from the sea. Perhaps he had been meant to press some sort of button or perform another variety of action that he had neglected as he neglected universally any action not relevant to the problem in question, which was— the problem was—

He squeezed his eyes shut because the corners of the room had abandoned their set positions and were wavering rather nauseously above him.

The problem was that the previous seven cyphers had been dependent upon material aspects of the stargate system— the first requiring a conceptualization of the DHD as a cryptographic machine not unlike the Enigma, the second utilizing the gate’s celestial error correction system as the seed for a linear-feedback shift register, the third relying on wormhole fluctuations as a source of randomness, the fourth— no, the fifth— no, the fifth had used a block cypher in which the rounds proceeded according to the geometric shapes encoded in the gate’s constellations, and the sixth had been based on an elliptic curve and had required knowing or predicting the locations of gates throughout the Milky Way Galaxy, and he did not know precisely how he had broken it, and it was at this point that he had begun to be troubled by the notion that the problems _wanted_ to be solved, and that they did not just want to be solved, but wanted in fact to be solved by—

A door slammed across the hall and Rush twitched, sending a droplet of sweat flying because his hair was wet.

His hair was wet and his shirt was wet and Daniel Jackson said, “The flat-pack economy is signing the death warrant of craftsmanship-based civilization. I can’t believe you would—“

But Jackson was not in the room. The room was empty, or rather Rush was in the room and his laptop was in the room perched on a brown cardboard box, sCrypt running its clean white lines againsta pale gray box on the screen, because yes Stargate Command had its own proprietary Air Forceian cryptanalytic software but he could not tolerate the its jumbled, blocky, and repetitive code, and the computer’s power cable stretched across the empty span of floorboards to an outlet, and a crumpled white shirt lay like a ghost in the approximate region of the doorway, and an equally crumpled white shirt from yesterday, and that was the set of objects occupying the space of the room.

“—not a craftsman,” an unfamiliar voice said, and Jackson said, “That’s the principle of the economy. You purchase what others create.”

“And I did,” the voice said. “I purchased what Mitchell is currently creating with a screwdriver and a lot of swearing.”

They were speaking out in the hallway. Rush turned his head to stare at the door and this made his field of vision oscillate.

How long had it been since he’d eaten?

He was not sure how long he’d lain motionless on the floor. He had been thinking about the problem.

If Jackson was in the building, the likelihood was low that he would simply go away without attempting to initiate conversation as he had adopted the inexplicable and fucking irritating goal of fucking _socializing_ Rush as though Rush were some sort of feral animal— dropping by without warning and attempting to demand that Rush accompany him to some sort of gastropub frequented by stargate personnel, or to a craft brewery, or once to the Colorado Springs Philharmonic, as though Rush had expressed any desire to go to any of these fucking places, as though he wouldn’t rather slit his own fucking wrists than sit in a concert hall in the dark in the stillness with the slim ivory hyphen of the conductor’s baton raised, suggesting a continuation beyond that moment or beyond any fucking moment since she had—

He pressed his damp mouth to the wood floor and listened to Jackson’s voice without processing what Jackson was saying.

He was going to be sick, probably. And Jackson would not go away.

The only possible logical outcome of these observations was for him to force himself to his feet, shaky-legged and slipping slightly in the patch of sweat he’d left on the floorboards. He discovered that he was light-headed and shivering in his thin cotton undershirt, the only shirt he was wearing, which meant that the white shirt by the door was probably the shirt he had been wearing today, or yesterday, because probably he had not changed his clothing in some unclear but significant amount of time, and he gripped at the wall as he forced his way towards the toilet where, to his intense surprise, he was not sick, but knelt on the pale linoleum for some time anyways in anticipation.

Then he was seated on the floor of the shower and he did not know how this had occurred, precisely, but cool water was streaming over his head. He watched it in fascination for a while, the formation and deformation of the droplets in patterns too complex for mathematics to contain, before he realised that he was still fully clothed, which solved some problems but created others; namely: with the addition of soap, the current situation could pass for laundering, but it was certainly not the _conventional_ route undertaken to achieve that goal, and showering without the removal of clothing was itself something of an outlier behavior, which was what he was trying to avoid. Not that he himself was interested in convention or any of the various forms of normative performance that congregated themselves under the sheltered center of the Gaussian curve—

_—Civilisation, she said with an arched brow and a note of the faux-didactic, is the long and, one suspects, rather bad-tempered chronicle of human beings subordinating themselves to someone else’s interest._

_—A paradox. He was struggling with his tie._ Someone _must refuse subordination. Either the awful repetitiveness of all that modern music has dulled your senses, or I’ve found myself in some sort of philosophical trap._

_She laughed and turned him to face her, hands first on his shoulders and then going to sort the topological mess he’d made of the tie’s two ends. —The paradox is the point, she said._

—but he was attempting and had been attempting for some time to forestall the concern of others because the relevant problem was not whether or not he was _fine,_ mentally, physically, fucking— _ontologically_ , et cetera; _teleologically_ he was fine, and therefore the relevant problem was clearly—

He sucked in an unsteady breath and closed his eyes and pictured the 27-trit segments of the seventh-chevron cyphertext and let the water beat against the top of his head.

When this had happened for a sufficient amount of time, he washed and stripped off his heavy clothing and stepped out of the shower and walked to the room that had been designated, on the floor plan that Daniel had attempted to force him to look at, as a bedroom, but that was actually the room where the boxes lived, except that boxes did not live anywhere, being by their very nature inanimate; it was only a perceptual defect that made him feel that these boxes _lived_.

They lived and he did not want them to live but he could not bring himself to kill them and it was possible that he had wished for the plane carrying them to Colorado to crash, maybe; or the truck, if it was a truck, to skid off the road: an unfortunate accident in which everything was lost but it was not of his doing. He pictured electrical systems malfunctioning, a driver’s cigarette igniting, a wildfire spreading in the dry grass of the American Southwest. Devouring the boxes that held her books and her records and all the variations of her concert dress, black on black on black because it was convention, silk and velvet and taffeta and one pair of Louboutins for a daring hint of red and the Peter Pan collar whose cotton shape had put a white accent on her neckline, and the single pearl she wore that rested just above it.

But this had not happened and so at least he was supplied with clothing.

He pulled a white undershirt and a pair of jeans from the half-empty box closest to him.

He was not certain where his shoes were located at this exact moment and though he was certain that he was technically possessed of more than one pair of shoes, the others were buried somewhere in the three-deep den of the boxes and he did not want to risk disturbing the neatly-stacked and only barely docile slumber of the boxes because he had, metaphorically and metaphorically only, a dread of what might happen to his hand if it dared to reach in.

If there were no shoes then there needn’t be any socks either. This stood to reason.

So he was barefoot when Jackson knocked at the door, but this could be excused because he did not intend to let Jackson into the apartment. He had never let Jackson into the apartment before; to do so would certainly, _certainly_ result in concern, and while David might have been amenable to the argument that _teleologically_ Rush was fine, and that the condition of the apartment did not suggest otherwise, Rush doubted that the same could be said for Jackson. Jackson’s perspective tended to be… holistic.

What he intended to do was open the door and—

But he was finding it quite difficult to _reach_ the door and he thought that this probably ought not to be the case.

He braced his hand against the wall and swallowed.

He was aware of the presence of the boxes behind the closed door of the bedroom as though they transmitted the heavy and threatening data of their bodies to him.

Subjectively he felt that the top of his skull had been opened and something was spilling out. Something he needed.

Dimly, he was aware of Jackson knocking again.

“Yes,” he said thickly. “Just give me a—“

And he was able to make his way to the narrow hall that led to the door, trailing his hand along the bare wall, inch by inch.

“Hey,” Jackson said when Rush opened the door. His hand was still raised in a gesture of knocking. His brow furrowed in a way that expressed dismay and confusion, which was a fairly common expression for Jackson’s face.

“Jackson,” Rush said, with what he hoped was haughty impatience but feared was not.

“Nick,” Jackson said. “You look—“

Abruptly Rush became aware that his hair was hanging in damp strands around his face, dripping onto the cotton shoulders of his shirt. He raked it back with a surge of irritation, a motion whose completion made him slightly dizzy.

“—stressed,” Jackson finished, a beat late.

“Yes,” Rush said.

“I was in the neighbourhood and I thought maybe— Is the electricity not working? It seems really dark in here, and— why is it so hot?” Jackson leaned in as though trying to get a look over Rush’s shoulder.

Rush barred his way with a rigid arm. “No reason.”

“Is your thermostat broken? You can get someone to look at that, you know; you just—“

Rush’s hand, where it gripped the edge of the doorframe, had gone numb. He thought that this was not a good sign, and that in a moment the iridescent lights he seemed to be wearing as a halo were going to dangerously foreclose on his consciousness. “Did you,” he said, “have a _point_ to get to, or have you just stopped by to proselytise about the joys of air conditioning repair?”

Jackson’s face loomed before him, squinting and bitten-lipped with benevolent worry. “I wanted to introduce you to your new neighbour, but you seem kind of— are you okay?”

“Yes,” Rush bit out, in defiance of the evidence presented by the visible trembling of his hands.

“You don’t _seem_ okay.”

“Well, I am. Is there anything further I can—“ _help you with_ , Rush intended to say, but the words failed to issue forth. He blinked, confounded by his body’s unaccountable betrayal. His moistened his lips, or tried to; his mouth was very dry and his pulse was racing. He fixed his gaze on Jackson’s eyes, blue and enormous; they seemed to be the colour of air, and weightless, as Rush himself was weightless or perhaps disembodied, aware only of Jackson saying something that did not quite cohere into intelligible speech, and that was where he would like to be, Rush thought hazily, beyond the asymptote of articulation, in the space where nothing could be said and so there was no struggle to say it; the rest was not silence but formless noise; and he reached towards it, knowing though that if he reached then he still had a body, and so long as he had a body he could not—

* * *

He opened his eyes with a sense of loss that he could not account for.

He was lying on a couch with his bare feet propped up atop the far armrest.

For a moment, uncomprehending, he stared at them.

The couch was upholstered in cool dark leather. The fingers of his right hand twitched against it, hesitantly, as though checking that it was real, or they were real, or that some ontological relation existed between them, the nature of which Rush did not feel robust enough to immediately express.

He did not recognise the room he was in.

A man was sitting on the coffee table across from him. He wore a black t-shirt and an expression of mild and amiable confusion that seemed to have been beaten into him, which meant that he was probably military. Typical. Hair: dark and too-long-ish, escaping here and there in unpredictable bursts. It made him into a blunted scarecrow figure. When he saw that Rush was watching, his forehead creased in a stupid sort of consternation.

Resigned to some form of social interaction, Rush said, “Who the fuck are you, then?”

“Hey,” the man said. “I wasn’t sure when you’d wake up. How are you feeling?”

How was he feeling.

He took stock of his body. It appeared, for all intents and purposes, extant. His head ached. His most immediate urge was to close his eyes and press his face against the smooth expanse of the couch’s leather. It smelt new and unsoiled by any traces of material existence.

Perhaps if he had bought new furniture, he thought. Perhaps if he had burnt down the house in San Francisco and bought new furniture, he could have— because space shaped you; that was why they had people design prisons, because in some obscure way objects around you taught you how to live, instilled moral precepts, equipped you with the art of being human, but it would not have worked, because nothing stays new, and he could not tolerate the thought of objects communicating any kind of history to him when he held them in his hands.

He realised that he had gone a long time without speaking. “I’m fine,” he said. “Where the fuck am I?”

“My place,” the man said. He looked perplexed for no apparent reason. “Across the hall from you. I just moved in. Everett Young.”

Rush pushed himself to a seated position and grimaced as a wave of queasiness swept him. “Is that meant to be some form of obscure code phrase?”

“It’s my name,” the man said. “Colonel Everett Young. I don’t think you should get up; you’re—“

Rush ignored this unsolicited advice and attempted to lever himself to his feet.

A brief span of time then ensued in which he could not entirely track the orientation of his body.

When this span of time had passed, he found that he was sitting on the couch with his forehead pressed to the backs of his knees. Someone was laying a cold cloth against the nape of his neck. He could sense their nearness to him, the warmth that came off their body, the shift of restless muscles, and he could not tolerate such a proximity, so his first impulse was to jerk violently away with a wordless, startled sound.

“Jesus!” the man, Young, whoever he was, said, and then, in a different tone, “ _Jesus."_

Rush raised his head, where he’d taken up residence in a defensive hunch at the end of the couch, and saw that Young was wincing, clutching at one hip, his breathing gone shallow.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Rush said.

Young gave him a disbelieving look, then made an frustrated gesture with one hand. “You know what, just go ahead.”

Rush shook his head, uncomprehending. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Who the fuck, where the fuck, what the fuck… Aren’t you going to go for the full set?”

They stared at each other.

Young’s mouth was turned down. It made him look sour. But the lines in his face were lines of pain, deeply cut ones. Something _was_ wrong with him, Rush presumed; and perhaps that was worthy of notice— something was so seldom wrong with them, the immaculate slabs of meat that patrolled the bases, forts, compounds of Colorado, who died or didn’t but never gave the impression of being anything but hearty and neat— but Rush wasn’t in the mood to notice.

“ _How_ the fuck did I get here,” Rush said deliberately. “And _why_ the fuck are you nursemaiding me with fucking—“ He pointed at the cloth. “ _Cold compresses?_ ”

“You have fucking heatstroke,” Young said, sounding irritated. “You fainted in the hallway because you had your thermostat cranked to a hundred degrees or something, and Jackson carted you in here since he wanted you to meet me anyway—“

“Why, exactly, would Jackson want _me_ to meet _you_?” Rush peered sceptically at Young’s unremarkable demeanour. “ _I_ am one of the world’s top thinkers in the field of computational complexity theory, involved with a cryptographic problem of such magnitude that it’s unlikely I could even render it in terms accessible to your barely-adequate intellect. _You_ , I suspect, or rather hypothesise on the basis of available data, spend much of your time shooting guns at other sentient creatures, or— given your clearly substandard biomechanical status— _did_.”

Young’s expression tightened further. “I guess Jackson figured someone needed to babysit you and your giant computer brain, since you fall down as soon as you leave your apartment. Or the SGC did; they were the ones who figured, as long as I was moving, I might as well move in next to you.“

Rush stared at him flatly. “A bodyguard,” he said.

“ _No_ , not a bodyguard; I’m on medical leave.”

“A spy, then.”

Young, the spy, clenched his eyes shut and rubbed his temples. “I’m not a _spy_. They thought—“

“Right,” Rush said. “I’ve heard enough. I’m leaving.”

Enacting this statement of intent proved unexpectedly problematic.

Young waited with a look of muted superior fucking _I-told-you-so_ -ness for several minutes while Rush tried and failed to stand, his legs having acquired approximately the consistency and weight-bearing capacity of jelly. When at last Rush gave up and tipped his head back against the broad leather cushion, heart hammering traitorously below his ribs, Young’s expression had changed to one of satisfaction.

“I’ll go get you a glass of water,” he said.

 _Young_ could stand, the bastard, though with effort; when he returned from the semi-detached kitchen and curtly thrust a tumbler full of lukewarm water at Rush, Rush saw that he was wearing a black medical brace over his t-shirt.

Rush took the glass of water with bad grace and drank it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything to drink at all. Unless the shower counted. Perhaps it didn’t, at least not in terms of the performance-of-normative-functions. Drinking made him feel halfway human, which he did not think was what he wanted. He shut his eyes and tried to think in 27-trit segments. +1 +1 0 -1 +1 +1 -1 0 +1 0 +1 0 0 -1 0 +1 -1 0 0 0 -1 0 +1 -1 -1 0 -1. His mind felt wrung-out, like the damp cloth that Young had laid against the back of his neck. He craved the return of that cloth and made an effort to mitigate against such a craving.

“Jackson had to run, by the way,” Young said. A sudden and disorientating imbalance in the cushions suggested that he had taken a seat on the far side of the couch once again. “But Mitchell went to get you some Gatorade.”

“Who?”

“Colonel Mitchell. From SG-1?”

Rush made a limp and dismissive gesture at the team’s name. He had a vague sense that he had been introduced to ‘Mitchell’ at some point within the last six months and had classed him as one of a number of interchangeable units in the set ‘Colonel.’ “Gatorade?”

“It’s good for dehydration."

“I neither need nor desire any such thing.”

“Well, you’re still drinking it. I think I’m supposed to make sure you don’t die or something.”

Rush tried to summon a noise that would adequately express his disdain at the notion that some half-crippled colonel might exercise any sovereignty over him. It emerged as more of a sigh, curdled with discontent around the edges. He couldn’t seem to make his eyes open. His body felt heavy and full of water. He didn’t like that, the sense of being weighted down, bound to earth by physically inexplicable natural forces, or rather bound to any object of mass, anything that turned out to be sufficiently massive and near; in proximity always and never where he wanted to be, which was alone and remote, loose in the vastness of space, and if he could rid himself of his _own_ mass then spacetime would not warp around him and he would not sink into the couch’s dark and musk-smelling leather, conscious of the noise of Young’s breathing and the apartment’s stir of cool air, and perhaps this was why he had not bought new furniture. _This._ “Gatorade,” he said vaguely.

“Yeah. It’s good for you.”

“Unlikely.”

Young said, drily, “How about you let me decide that, hotshot.”

“Patronizing,” Rush murmured, or didn’t; it was not entirely clear.

He was conscious of Young standing, a slow process that ended in a caught breath. He wondered about the nature of Young’s injury and then his thoughts drifted to consider the nature of injuries in general: the body’s stupid propensity to suffer and retain them. David had been injured in the spring. For quite a long time no one would tell Rush where he was, and then he reappeared, but something had been wrong with him. It had been the first time Rush thought of the stargate as leading to other places— not other planets or other galaxies per se, but places in which men were hurt, in which the normal rules of violence were no longer applicable, and he did not know the theory that would allow him to harmonise these incompatible laws and mechanics, the different means and frequencies with which men were hurt, and it was not the first time that he had encountered this problem.

He thought that David had been tortured.

 _It’s classified_ , David had told him.

“Go to sleep,” Young said. He had a curious voice, rough and pitched lower than was normal, as though he was always having to scrape it out of the bottom of some pit that he’d found himself in.

“No,” Rush said on reflex.

Young made an exasperated huffing sound that might have been laughter. “Pretty sure you’re out of luck there.”

Rush would have retorted, but intolerably, Young was right. His thoughts were splitting and branching in rhizomatic fashion, intruded upon by ideas that belonged only unclearly to him. There was darkness and it seemed to him like the inside of the stargate, the place from which he had pulled the cyphertext, as though it had been put there for him, as though he alone could have seen that it was there in the dark, waiting, because he himself knew the sensation of being encyphered.

It was a warm place, that darkness, but there was something on the other side of it.

He hung, suspended.

Someone lifted his feet and placed them on the far end of the couch and he frowned, wanting to protest, but not quite waking.

A hand brushed the stray hair brusquely from his face, and then laid a damp cloth against his head. It was very cold and like slipping underwater. He breathed out and imagined himself curled tightly under the stone shield of a single chevron, small and hidden and sleeping and very safe.


	3. Chapter 3

“Are we going to talk about it?” Mitchell asked, when they’d been drinking in silence for a good ten minutes.

Young took a long pull on a bottle of shitty IPA and didn’t immediately answer.

The two of them were standing on the balcony, looking out at where the sun had gone behind the mountains and the slopes had turned night-colored even though it was only really twilight yet. Young had left the door propped open, and he could feel the ice-cold air-conditioning against his bare arms, in spite of the way the building was baked through with dying warmth.

“You mean the science nerd asleep on my couch?” he said at last, only lightly evasive. “Because I don’t know if you’ve met this guy, but I gotta tell you, he’s kind of a son-of-a-bitch.”

Mitchell gave him a disappointed look. “V. Seriously. I bring you the gift of beer, and you’re going to try to play me like I’m stupid?”

Young glanced indoors to where the living room was full of shadows, as thick as though they’d pitched a tent. He could make out the ghostly white of Rush’s t-shirt against the couch, rucked up slightly where Rush had thrown one arm across his face in his sleep. Young thought they _ought_ to be talking about Rush, probably; about who Rush was, about why Jackson had wanted Young as his babysitter; about why he’d fainted, apparently, because he couldn’t operate a goddamn thermostat without supervision; about something else, something that Young would be damned if he could put a finger on, something about Rush that troubled him.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. He took another drink.

“Uh-huh.”

“You know, I don’t remember it being this hot last year in August. I must have been offworld for a while or something, I swear—“

Mitchell cast his eyes upward. “Come on. You’re going to make me say it?”

Young paused for a moment and then shrugged, awkwardly, miserably, picking at the paper label of his bottle.

“I couldn’t help noticing the big old glaring absence of one David Eduardo Telford from the whole Everett Young moving process,” Mitchell said.

“Yeah.” Young stared down at a stubborn shred of paper that was stuck to his finger. “Is his middle name seriously Eduardo? I didn’t know that.”

There was a short silence.

“So, are you two still,” Mitchell said, and didn’t finish the question.

Young shut his eyes and brought a hand down to rest against his right hip: in the approximate place, he imagined, where his pelvis had been broken, at least according to what they had shown him on the X-rays. It had been the clearest break and the easiest to understand for that reason. When he thought of what had happened to him he thought of that dark line running down his middle. His hand sometimes went to his hip when he felt unsteady, like some part of his brain was convinced he could hold himself together that way. It had started to be something he did when he thought of David, and he didn’t know why, really, except that there was the obvious explanation: that David had been there, that it had all been _for_ David, that David had dragged him up from the iron-oxide dust on the slope of the caldera, mashed their lips together, forced him to breathe in the nitrogen-heavy air.

And David had been there afterwards in the hospital, like the decent guy he was, even though he’d said, _I still don’t think it’s a good idea,_ and, _Maybe Emily would— if she knew it was over, really over between us; an injury like this, it’s a wake-up call for some people_ , and Young had nodded and said, _Yeah, you’re right, of course, yes._

Even then, already, it had been hard for him to look at David. Young’s body felt like something had been torn away from it, and he must have felt like that before the mission, he thought; he _must_ have, because otherwise nothing much had changed, really, except for all the screws they had put inside of him. It wasn’t like he and David hadn’t saved each other’s asses before, more than once; they’d both spent years in the program, and they’d served together on more than one team. And the thing with Emily throwing him out when he told her, the fight with David— that had all been before he’d headed out to P9C-455, the planet the Lucian Alliance called Sest Bet. Nothing had happened since then that _mattered_ ; it was all just torn-up bone and muscle. So maybe this was some sort of delayed reaction, he thought, the way he looked at David and felt— dead.

“It’s been— a really long year,” he said.

“Yeah,” Mitchell said quietly. “I get that.”

“I mean, it’s fine,” Young said, too fast. “It _is_ fine. It was never really serious anyway. We were just— Emily overreacted. We were always just messing around.”

Another silence. Mitchell took a pull on his own drink and shifted. “We would have stood by you,” he said. “If you wanted to— you know.”

“Who’s _we?_ ” Young asked, with a hint of an edge to his tone.

“I don’t know. SG-1. Me, Jackson, whoever. Even maybe O’Neill.”

“Right.”

“I mean, I won’t pretend I get it; hell, I figure Basic’d be enough to turn someone off anyone swinging a dick for life, but—“

“That’s not—“ Young swung his beer bottle in a sharp gesture. “That’s not what it was; I’m not— you know. It was just a good time. It happens.”

“Sure,” Mitchell said after a long pause. “Well. At least you’re getting a fresh start all around, right?”

“Complete with new roommate, apparently.” Young cast a wry look over his shoulder, to where Rush was still asleep on the couch in the thickening dark. “You know Jackson wanted me to keep him here overnight? I don’t think that’s gonna happen. What exactly is the story with this guy?”

Mitchell shrugged. “Hell if I know half of it. He’s some math whiz working on the nine-chevron gate address they can’t dial; he found a subroutine or something, I guess, in the gate itself that’s supposed to figure the whole thing out.”

Young frowned. “So why’s Jackson all het up about him? I can’t exactly see them being friendly. Frankly, I’m having a hard time picturing _anyone_ getting friendly with him.”

Mitchell shrugged again, but his mouth tightened in a way that suggested the effort of not speaking. “Beats me.”

“Mitchell.”

“Look: what I know, I can’t tell you, and what I _will_ tell you is that what I know ain’t much. Just— there’s shit going on the likes of which you and I are to lowly to be kept in the loop on.”

“You’re the head of SG-1,” Young said. “I wouldn’t exactly describe you as _lowly_.”

Mitchell shook his head without speaking. He wasn’t looking at Young. He was staring out past the balcony, chewing his lip. “You know he’s #1 on the Lucian Alliance’s Top Ten Most Wanted? Your roommate?”

Young glanced at him uncomprehending. “ _Rush?_ _That_ guy?” He turned and jerked a thumb towards Rush, as though he might have gotten it wrong somehow. Rush’s arm was still draped over his face, and he had curled his knees in towards his chest. He looked about as threatening as a half-drowned cat someone had fished out of a river.

“They want him alive,” Mitchell said. “No one’ll say why. At least not all of it. Jackson knows, I think, but he’s not talking.”

“Jesus.” Young leaned forward stiffly to set his mostly-empty bottle of beer down and rubbed his hands across his face. “I don’t need this, Cam. I’m tired. I’m not—“

He didn’t know how to explain what he wasn’t. He was tired, that was it; he was tired, and empty, like all of him had gone into the effort of healing. And maybe it had: the immobilized weeks, and then the months of PT, sweating while strangers had put their hands all over him, and David visiting him like clockwork, David with the red edges of new scars showing above the collar of his shirt, and at night he woke disoriented, heart pounding from dreams he was afraid of, drained of the effort to even climb out of bed.

“I’m not a bodyguard,” he said at last. “And I’m not a babysitter. I just need some time to figure things out.”

Mitchell put a hand on his shoulder, just for a second: not a casual slap, but a more solid, undemanding weight. “I get it, man. I’ll talk to Carter, maybe, see what she knows. Don’t worry about it. Just— stick some food in him, send him home. No one’s expecting you to be his best buddy.”

Young stared out at the slice of moon that was hanging over the mountains. Or the whole moon was, he guessed; it was just that he couldn’t see it like this, from where he was standing— couldn’t see the whole shape of it till something that didn’t want to move got forced to, got dragged along into an alignment it was always resisting.

“Right,” he said. “Just send him home.”

* * *

Later, when Mitchell had left (with the admonition that he had better not catch Young still living out of boxes the next time he dropped by), Young found himself back in the living room. He switched on one of the mass-produced and supposedly stylish lamps that he’d bulk-bought on a single trip to IKEA, where he’d also, without much energy, picked out shelving, a kitchen table, and a bed. He could afford better, but why bother, was his reasoning; Emily had made it pretty clear she wasn’t going to be coming around to check out how he was doing, and even if David did, he’d never been the type of person to care much, and as for Young himself— he’d be offworld soon enough, at least God, God, he hoped so, because he didn’t think he could stand to be on Earth anymore, and even if he wasn’t, he just couldn’t summon up much feeling about furniture one way or the other. He thought that without Mitchell’s threat, he probably would have left the boxes as-is; he was sure Mitchell knew it.

A pale glow spread through the room, kind of a ghostly moonlight color. He navigated the terrain of couch and coffee table, feeling unfamiliar, like he’d been parachuted in. It’d been a long time since he’d lived alone. But then, he wasn’t really alone now, was he?

He leaned against the wall, not trusting his assemblage of bones and muscle and metal plates to sit, and considered Rush.

The man had slept for hours, and even though he slept skittish, frowning and twitching and eventually sort of shoving his face between the cushion and the armrest of Young’s couch, he’d also slept pretty hard. Young got the vibe from him of an exhaustion that wouldn’t be discharged easy. Maybe it was because he was skinny, but he seemed run-down in the particular way you got when something had been chasing you, not just like a regular geek.

Young didn’t know what Rush was running from. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to stand there watching Rush sleep on the couch in a room that was filled with islands of unpacked boxes, some labeled with Emily’s angry black scrawl. He couldn’t stand to have another person so close to him, even if they were separated by a good six feet and an armrest; it was like he was afraid that Rush would pick up on something about him, something he was broadcasting without meaning to, or else that he’d pick up on something about Rush that he _didn’t want to know_ , so he said sharply, “Rush.”

—Kicking the end of the couch with a foot.

Rush startled awake all at once, jerking upwards and hunching protectively into himself. He looked bleary-eyed and deeply confused. “The fuck?”

He had a really strong Scottish accent, which Young had noticed before with some bemusement. You didn’t hear a lot of scientists talk like that.

“Dinnertime,” Young said. “I told Jackson I’d feed you, since he doesn’t seem to think you can do it yourself.”

Actually, Jackson had seemed like he didn’t even trust Rush to sleep on Young’s couch without causing some form of destruction. “I should stay,” he’d said, lingering in the doorway. “I can call Jack, tell him—“ “It’s fine,” Young had insisted. Of course, that had been before he’d actually met Rush.

Rush stared at Young. His hair, which looked like it had never seen the sharp end of a pair of scissors, was shoved up in a rumpled mess on one side of his head. It had been wet when Jackson dragged him in here, Young remembered, which he’d let pass without an explanation. It must have dried funny.

“Ah, fuck,” Rush said again. “I thought I might have dreamt you.”

“Do you usually dream about passing out and swearing about people?”

Rush adjusted his glasses, squinting as though he hoped Young might disappear if he did so. “It seemed like the more appealing prospect of the two.”

“Nice. You know, I let you sleep on my couch.”

“That was involuntary on my part. I don’t sleep on couches.”

“What, like, as a habit?”

“As a rule.” Rush tried, without much success, to straighten his shirt.

Young rolled his eyes. “Sorry if you get a crick in your world-expert neck because I wasn’t stoked about having a stranger in my bedroom.”

“You misunderstand me,” Rush said. “Unsurprisingly.”

He managed to make it to his feet, a little unsteadily, and stood there for a minute, looking like he was trying to stay upright.

“Well, you’re one up on last time you tried that already,” Young said. “So it looks like maybe the couch did you some good.”

Rush gave him a vague, disdainful look. “Who exactly are you?”

“Everett Young,” Young said. “We’ve been over this.” He was already starting to feel exhausted, like Rush had managed to punch him in the face without doing anything but talking to him.

“Yes, yes. A colonel. I remember. Yet another interchangeable unit for the set of colonels. I’ll make a note.”

Apparently, Rush felt this constituted a satisfactory end to the conversation, because he turned his back on Young and headed for the door.

“Nope,” Young said, pushing himself off the wall with a faint current of ache running through his pelvis, the kind that seemed to trace out the exact contours of the break. He managed to put himself between Rush and the door while Rush was still making his way, wobbling and barefoot, towards it. “I had Mitchell buy Gatorade for you, and Jackson was pretty specific about the food.”

Rush narrowed his eyes and turned his head to the side with a sharp sound of exasperation. “ _Colonel_ Young,” he said, as though testing out the name and finding that he disliked it. He paused. “I don’t sleep on beds,” he said. “Or couches. I confess that I’m not terribly enthusiastic even about the concept of sleep. I don’t enjoy beer, pizza, hamburgers, or whatever fine example of American cuisine you feel yourself compelled to offer me. I’m not interested in being your friend; I’m not particularly interested in being your _neighbor_ , and I should just think that Daniel fucking Jackson has better things to do than micro-engineer the details of my diet and social life.”

Young shifted his weight to one foot and let pain needle its way up his metal-plated femur. “Welp,” he said. “Apparently not.”

Rush raked an irritated hand through his hair and sighed.

“Come on,” Young said. “We’re on the same side here. We both want Jackson off our backs. You drink some juice, I order a pizza, we don’t have to make conversation. Everybody ends up happy.”

“It’s unjustifiably optimistic of you to foresee anything like happiness in the scenario you’ve just described.”

“You’ve gotta be hungry. I’ve done the whole passing-out thing before; boot camp was brutal. You’ve got a killer headache right about now, right?”

Rush hesitated,then combined the barest of half-nods with a halting, grudging, hunch-shouldered shrug. It didn’t seem like he was really convinced; more like he was too tired and disgruntled to come up with a _no_ that Young would swallow.

“I don’t eat pizza,” he said flatly, which seemed to mean: _Fine, you win, yes._

“Yeah, yeah.” Young turned to head toward the kitchen. “So, what? We can order in Chinese if you want; I think someone stuck a menu on the door.”

“Have you not got any _real_ food?”

Young paused, having just rounded the counter island and been hit by the sight of the single box of kitchen stuff that was taking up space on the linoleum, waiting to be opened. He’d forgotten that pretty much anything he could cook with was still in that box. He didn’t know exactly what Emily had put in it. At home, they’d had an actual kitchen— a whole room, not just a stylish offset. But neither of them had ever been much for cooking, so what they’d managed to accumulate off their registry had pretty much been the extent of their appliance selection. Emily had been talking about getting new dishes, and Young had nodded, staring out the kitchen window while he was thinking about the way David’s hands curled around a gun.

“—Not really,” he said belatedly, tearing his eyes away from the box. “I mean, Mitchell did the shopping. I don’t really know.”

There was a pint of milk and a carton of eggs in the fridge, when he checked, along with the rest of the six-pack that Young and Mitchell had been drinking; a block of cheese, a package of tortillas, and some bacon, which at least showed Mitchell knew him. If he looked in the freezer, he’d probably find a stack of microwaveable meals.

He pulled out a bottle of Gatorade and slid it over the counter to Rush, who had balanced his elbows delicately against the marble on the opposite side. “Drink up. Good for heatstroke.”

The corners of Rush’s mouth turned down, but he twisted the cap off the bottle. “I do not,” he said, “have heatstroke.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It turned out to be wee bit warmer than I expected.”

“The weather’s been the same all week. You didn’t turn your AC up?”

Rush used drinking the electric-blue Gatorade as an excuse not to answer. When he set the bottle down, he made a face. “Disgusting,” he said.

“Full of electrolytes, though.”

“I’d wager you’ve no conceptual understanding of what an electrolyte is.”

Young, in spite of himself, was at least a little amused by that. He was starting to get the sense that the continual barrage of insults wasn’t really targeted at him, but might be more of a general means through which Rush interacted with the world. “I can do scrambled eggs,” he said. “Or quesadillas. Do either of those count as real food?”

That earned him a disdainful look. “Hardly.”

“Then I’d say we should order in, because you’re pretty much out of luck.”

With a ponderous sigh, Rush pushed himself away from the counter and rounded it to throw open the door of the refrigerator. He glared at the variety of products revealed within.

Young took a seat at the counter and waited patiently for him to render a verdict. “I’ve got some pans,” he said. “They’re in the box. I’m not sure which ones; my ex-wife packed it.”

Rush made an impatient hand gesture in his general direction. “I suppose the odds of your possessing a sous-vide are low?”

“A minute ago you were pretty sure I didn’t know what an electrolyte was, so…”

“Mm.” Rush stared at the box. He seemed to be coming to some kind of complicated conclusion; it looked like he was doing math in his head. “ _Fine_ ,” he said at last, in a tone of disgust, and a minute later he’d picked up the boxcutter that Mitchell had left on the counter and was using it to tear into Emily’s neat taping job.

Young watched as he dug through the box, which seemed to have an awful lot of loose knives in it— he wondered, belatedly, if he ought to have asked Jackson if it was a good idea to let Rush handle knives, or boxcutters, for that matter. It was pretty clear that, whatever else Rush was, and whatever the Lucian Alliance wanted with him, at the very least he wasn’t _normal_. Less normal, even, than your average SGC geek, and most of those guys were in some kind of league where they dressed up like orcs on weekends.

It wasn’t that Young thought _normal_ was tied up with moral values, even though he knew guys who thought that way— hell, he was pretty sure that Cam had started out as one of them. He felt like he’d given up any right to judge what was and wasn’t moral. And maybe he’d given up any right to judge what normal was, too, or would have felt that way if he didn’t still think of himself, in some strange, split-down-the-middle way, as the person he’d been before all of this happened, as though time had stopped when the al’kesh came down on the slope of the caldera, or even before that, when he came in the door and saw Emily holding his phone, and nothing since then was real, or was just the wrong shape and slippery, somehow, so that he didn’t know how to hold onto it.

Normal was— not slippery. That was the thing about normal. It was predictable, and things that weren’t predictable were things you had to keep in boxes, like the geeks in the labs who spent their free time making swords for their league, and didn’t pass out in their apartments while they were doing math equations.

Rush had pulled a cheese grater out of the box and was staring critically at it.

“Do you actually know how to cook?” Young asked. “Or are you just going through my stuff for the hell of it?”

“Who were you cheating with?” Rush returned without looking up. “And how did your wife find out?”

That caused pretty much all of the good feeling Young had built up towards him to evaporate in a burst. He pushed back from the counter, ignoring the sharp jerk of pain in his low back. “What the fuck,” he said.

Rush still didn’t look up. He shrugged, calm, composed, and malicious. “Yes,” he said. “I know how to cook.”

Young thought about throwing him out for a minute, but didn’t— mostly because when he stopped and considered it for a second, he had a feeling that was probably exactly what Rush was going for. A rush of recalcitrance made him determined to not give Rush anything Rush wanted.

So: “Nice,” he said shortly. “Real nice manners you got on you there.”

Rush made a dismissive hand gesture.

They didn’t talk for a while after that. Rush filled a saucepan with water and put it on the stove to boil, then lined up eggs, butter, bacon, and two baking potatoes that seemed like an awfully optimistic buy on Mitchell’s part. He washed plates and knives, chopped potatoes, and dropped eggs into the saucepan with a clinical, almost remote kind of skill.

“Microwave,” he said suddenly, just when Young thought they were playing a game of Silent Treatment Chicken, trying to figure out who was wiling to crack first, and pretty damn sure it wasn’t going to be him.

“What?”

“You need a microwave.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Young wasn’t really sure how to respond. “I thought it came built-in, but— turns out it didn’t. Figured I’d just order one online.”

He got a sharp nod that seemed to endorse his decision.

There was another silence. Bacon hissed in the skillet.

Young said, “You don’t really seem like a microwave guy.”

“Obviously I would never be so gauche as to utilize it as a instrument in _serious_ cooking,” Rush said without turning, lifting the now-apparently-hardboiled eggs from their saucepan with a slotted spoon. “However, in the absence of more sophisticated tools, it can be used to, inter alia, brown butter. I’m not particularly inclined to spare the amount of time it would take to produce a perfectly browned butter on the stovetop, so we’ll have to forgo it.”

“I’m in no hurry,” Young said.

Rush hunched his shoulders and said nothing.

“You’re hungry,” Young realized.

“Incorrect.”

“What’s wrong with being hungry?”

“What point is there in wasting my effort when you’re obviously incapable of informed culinary—“

“I’ve got chips,” Young said, just as Rush finished up with, “—appreciation?”

Rush looked as though Young had suggested eating the unpacked cardboard boxes.

“And beer,” Young said. “Chips and beer.”

“I’m sorry; you must have mistaken me for one of your squad of recreational fascists.” Rush was vigorously measuring out cayenne pepper and adding it to a bowl with an bizarre array of other ingredients, most of which must have been hiding in the cabinets; how much shopping had Mitchell done, anyway?

“Oh, right; I forgot, you’re too much of a snob for things like beer and sleeping. You know, I’m starting to see why Jackson called me in here. He obviously thought you needed _some_ kind of intervention”

 _That_ made Rush’s mouth tighten. “What did he say?”

“What?”

“What did Jackson say; what did he _fucking_ say? Did he tell you I needed a fucking _keeper_ , that I was some sort of _infant_ , or did he just feed you the usual misguided and wildly decontextualized shit about mental bloody stability? Because I’ll have you know I’m perfectly fucking stable, and if you’re going to be making notes on me in a little fucking journal to turn over to Stargate bloody Command, then you might as well save us both a great deal of trouble and set the whole thing on fire to start with, because believe you me, I’ve given the runaround to far better men.”

By the end of this, Rush was backed up against the stove, breathing hard and clutching a wooden mixing spoon with one hand.

There was a short silence.

“He didn’t say anything,” Young said quietly. He didn’t know why he was being quiet, because he didn’t really give a fuck about upsetting Rush; he didn’t even know the guy, and everything he did know so far could be pretty much summed up as: _asshole._ But he knew what it felt like to have people keeping an eye on you, he guessed, waiting for you to slip up and show that you weren’t quote-unquote _dealing with it_. “Just— that you were a math guy, and that you were having a hard time, and he thought it’d be good for you to have a neighbor.”

“ _Good for me to have a neighbor_ ,” Rush echoed, mocking. But he seemed maybe marginally less tense.

“What’s wrong with neighbors?”

“I don’t do neighbors.” Rush turned back to the stove, where he was fishing boiled chunks of potato out of a pan. “I don’t do neighbors; I don’t do housewarmings; I don’t do parties or ‘hanging out with the guys.’ I don’t do football leagues or rugby matches; I don’t do live-action roleplaying; I don’t do chess clubs or symphony concerts, and I _certainly_ don’t do whatever _this_ is.” He gestured between Young and himself with one finger.

“That’s a pretty impressive manifesto,” Young said, deadpan. “So what is this?”

Rush made an irritated noise and turned away without answering. He picked up the cheese grater and began to grate a boiled egg.

“Uh,” Young said. “You know that’s not a block of cheese you’re holding, right?”

“I did a DPhil in mathematics at Oxford.”

“Right.”

“I was awarded a Fields medal for my work in the field of computational complexity theory.”

“So, just to check, you _do_ know it’s an egg.”

Rush hurled the grater into the sink with some force, picked up a plate, and began practically flinging food onto it: potatoes, some kind of mustard-y looking sauce, two artfully arranged crispy spears of bacon, and a crumble of grated egg. He shoved the plate across the counter and sent a fork skidding after it.

Young stared dubiously down at the plate, which looked like something you might get in a fancy restaurant and be too nervous to touch for fear of eating it the wrong way. “Thanks. I think. Uh— what is it?”

“A deconstructed Viennese potato salad. You don’t have any apple cider vinegar, by the way.”

“I don’t even think I know what that is.” Young took a tentative bite of potato, scooping up the mustard-y… stuff and grated egg. “This isn’t bad.”

“As though you would know.” Rush himself had dumped the remaining ingredients together and was wolfing the stuff down at a rate that suggested he’d been starving.

Young watched him in fascination. “When’s the last time you ate?”

“When’s the last time you calculated the eigenvalues of a Sturm-Liouville operator?” Rush asked through a mouthful of half-chewed potatoes.

“You know, you eat like a twelve-year-old.”

“Yes, well, you _talk_ like an _two-year-old._ ”

“A twelve-year-old raised by wolves,” Young said. “And I’m pretty sure two-year-olds don’t really talk.”

“Whereas the range of your conversational ability astounds and impresses me.” Rush dumped the bowl he’d been eating out of into the sink and wiped the back of his mouth with his hand. “There. You fed me. I’m fed. And now I’m leaving. Let’s not do this again, ever.”

“I’m gonna knock on your door tomorrow to make sure you’re not dead,” Young said, although Rush did at least seem a little bit steadier on his feet.

“Which would cause you a greater inconvenience: if I died, or if I failed to?”

“You’re suggesting you would literally die to inconvenience me?” Young shook his head, fighting the incredulous smile he could feel laying siege to his expression. “I gotta admit, I’m kind of touched. We hardly know each other.”

“Yes, well.” Rush was at the door. He raised one hand in a brief, fluttering, irritated wave. “Try not to read too much into it. As a rule, I struggle to remember that American soldiers, much less sad, crippled, adulterous ones, are even possessed of other minds.”

So that shut Young’s smile down, and then Rush was gone, the door closing crisply behind him.

Young sighed and rested his elbows on the counter. There was the double blow: the room felt empty in Rush’s absence, suddenly transformed into an echo chamber where Young’s thoughts had nowhere to go except the place they were least wanted, which was back inside his head, and he was left with Rush’s closing words.

Sad. He probably was.

He forced himself to get up from his stool, in spite of the protesting muscles that didn’t want to perform the simple action. He didn’t know what they wanted, those muscles. To be shorter, to be longer, to be in some other body, to be part of making some other shape that wasn’t him, which was what they kept nagging at him about, as though he could do anything to change it. It should’ve been possible for him to explain to them that they were stuck like this now, or he was. All of them together. All of the pieces of him that were left.

He took one of the last beers from the fridge and levered the cap off against the countertop, a trick he’d learned from David, which David did better, as he did everything better.

The door to the balcony was still open a crack where he hadn’t been careful when he’d seen Mitchell off. The warm, but no longer quite so warm, night air was coming in, and it smelled of something that wasn’t new appliances and cardboard and ink. Young shoved it open the rest of the way, because he couldn’t bring himself to give a fuck about the air conditioning, and stood for a while right where the hardwood floor met cement, watching the lights of planes creep over the mountains and feeling about as small and far-away as them.


	4. Chapter 4

The room was cold because at some time between approximately one and three in the morning— he could not be more exact because he had not been looking at his computer, and he did not possess any other form of clock— Rush had found the right button to make it cold, and now he was standing and staring at a blank wall while his bare feet grew colder.

It occurred to him that he needed a cigarette.

He had not been looking at the white of the wall, but at the way a single insect, some form of very minuscule beetle, was making its ponderous way across the surface of it. What were walls made of, their surfaces? He didn’t know. It wasn’t topologically even, that material, or not precisely, and the beetle, in response to some delicate sense of the landscape’s danger, had charted a precarious course that ran at angles now obtuse, now acute, now straight, its antennae probing the currents of the air for very faint and finely-trilled signals that unseen obstacles lay ahead at distances the beetle had better be able to calculate.

He had been watching the beetle for a long time and had begun to develop sympathies with it. He didn’t know where it was going, but he wanted it to get there. He hoped that it was going off the plane of this bare white wall, where it would meet no companion, though it was presumptuous of him to suppose that companionship was something beetles might desire.

There were cigarettes—

But he did not at once know where, and then the sCrypt query his computer had been running completed with an audible chirp and he remembered that the cigarettes were beside his wallet, which was beside his keys, which were beside the computer, because he was for some reason not allowed to smoke in this, his own apartment that he presumably paid fucking money for, although he did not know for certain because it had all been automatically arranged so that he would not have to think about it, which was what she had suggested when they moved to San Francisco, too; _I know you too well, Nicholas, you’ll never remember_ , and he’d said, _I’ll make a note of it_ , to which she’d given him a scathing look. _And where will the note end up? Underneath a stack of journals? And the electricity getting turned off whilst I’m off playing the Wigmore Hall, probably, not that you’d notice; you’d sit in the dark._ He’d said, _I’d notice_ , _at the very least I’d notice—_

He tapped a cigarette out with a flick of his wrist and—

— _when the computer ran out of charge,_ and she’d said, _Yes, and what would you do? Call me, probably, confused; you’re—_

—fuck regulations, applied his lighter to it. The resulting inhalation—

_—hopeless, really._

—was exhilaratingly toxic, elation running in his veins as the chemicals spread throughout his body’s inner map. He felt it shortcut the circuits of his brain and then he could finally look at the sCrypt window, because he had remembered what the problem was again.

The problem. The axis. The exit, perhaps. The work. 

The altered parameters of his frequency analysis had produced the same puzzling results as previous iterations. The first seven cyphertext segments had decrypted to coordinates that corresponded to constellations appearing on the stargate’s glyphs. The eighth segment appeared to yield to very simple attacks, but what it yielded was nonsensical, or at least not a set of coordinates. He was certain that it was a dataset of some sort, but he was unable to determine the logic underlying the set. It certainly wasn’t a sequence of primes, nor was it anything as showy as transcendental numbers or Riemann zeros. Not integers or not _all_ integers and not proceeding in ascending order, which suggested the set was something other than a straightforward enumeration, perhaps something incomplete 

He was expected to understand it. By whom? Dead cryptographers who cocked their head with clever expressions, waiting for him to output an answer? Fuck them.

He felt them sometimes in the dead of night when he was sat cross-legged on the floor by his computer, scrolling through pocket files of metadata or looking at the text itself, lines and lines of ghostly -1s and 1s and 0s. He felt alone but not alone, in the presence of someone who wasn’t there _yet_ , but who _could_ be or _might be there;_ someone who had _once_ been there and had never quite departed, who had no material form and existed only as an invitation directed outwards through time towards the idea of him. They extended the possibility that he too could escape from some metaphysical prison whose confines he could barely articulate, but whose doors and walls and depths of solitary confinement he had known all his life. He was partly qualified. He wasn’t good enough yet. But they waited with bated breath, because he still might—

The cigarette was burning itself out between his fingers and he was angry at it suddenly and he ground it out in the styrofoam cup that still held a half-inch of instant coffee. 

He was going to go out, he decided. He was going to go out and drive to the supermarket and purchase some form of prepackaged sustenance, a foodstuff that tasted of nothing that he could put in his body so he would not fall down again, because that had been the problem, probably— not the heat but the fact that, as he had later calculated, he had gone at least thirty-two hours without eating. The ensuing syncope had meant having to deal with his fucking neighbour, a sad de-moustachioed-Dying-Gaul of a man who would not take the fucking hint that Rush was uninterested in any form of human correspondence and certainly not in consoling some hangdog and no doubt gun-happy officer who was being punished for his failure to keep it in his pants.

So. He was going to go out and he prepared for this by locating his shoes and donning a cardigan of a vague light brown colour that was clean although it had seen better days.

Then he went out, but he did not go to the supermarket. Instead he sat in his car for several minutes listening to the engine hum and thinking about the pitch of it and the pitch— both ascending and tortuous— of a leafblower nearby, inexplicable in the face of the evident fact that it was not autumn and was instead so hot that the walk from door to car had made sweat prickle on his skin. He did not know why he was listening to the pitches, but there was an importance in them, and after a while he shifted the car into gear and drove towards Cheyenne Mountain, the long turns of Norad Road almost now a relief and meditation. He had always liked driving: like being enclosed in a shell.

But more of a relief was when he passed out of the ambit of the mountains and was under the earth, in the dark, where he belonged.

He took the box of the elevator down to the narrow sterile halls of the laboratories, where several important-looking individuals ignored him, which was all right, because he preferred to be ignored, but in actual fact he needed—

He stopped an imbecilic-looking young man wearing an ostentatious white coat. “I need a set of natively configured DHD crystals.”

The young man adopted a befuddled expression. “What?”

“DHD crystals.”

The young man looked at him.

There was a long pause.

“ _DHD crystals_ ,” Rush emphasised, enunciating carefully. Americans had trouble with his accent, he had discovered, though he had drilled the worst of it out of himself long before he left San Francisco. “I need them. In their native configuration. A DHD itself would be best.”

The young man’s confusion appeared to deepen. “DHD crystals?”

Or perhaps he was simply stupid. Rush pressed a finger to his forehead, just over the bridge of his glasses, where his headaches inevitably found their origin point. “Yes.”

“Uh— do I know you?”

“No; we haven’t been introduced.” Rush kept the edge out of his tone, barely. 

“Oh. Well. I’m Dr. Dale Volker.” The young man pointed to the ID badge clipped to his coat, beaming with a moment of misplaced pride, as though the ownership of a badge was understood to confer some form of status and privilege. He then held out his hand for Rush to shake.

Rush stared at it. “Dr. Nicholas Rush,” he said coolly.

“Oh. _Oh!_ ” Dr. Dale Volker appeared undaunted. “Right! You work offsite! You’re the guy who— the code guy!” 

Rush was overtaken by a powerful urge to bury his head in his hands. “I’m a cryptanalyst attached to the Icarus Project. Yes.”

“You broke like _seven_ of those Ancient codes already!”

“Yes,” Rush said. “I need—“

 “That’s really just— it’s really _extremely_ impressive,” Volker said, pompously. He looked like he was about to attempt to shake Rush’s hand again.

“Yes,” Rush said.

“I would love to discuss your work with you— I mean, I’m an astrophysicist, really, but everyone ends having to adopt a generalist attitude here; it’s part of the program, and I’m sure you have a rudimentary knowledge of astrophysics if you were recruited to—“

“I need,” Rush said, his voice tightly controlled, “a set of DHD crystals. Natively configured.”

That caused Volker to revert back to bewildered again, as though he had not imagined a brane of the multiverse in which his astrophysical overtures of friendship might be rejected. “Oh. Well. I can show you—“

Hesitantly, he led Rush to the end of the hallway, through an unmarked double door and into a small lab where the central table was occupied by several rows of brightly coloured crystals enmeshed in a kind of complex wire nest. The wires emerged from power sources both terrestrial and other, then fed back from the crystals to desktop computers apparently configured for measurement of some nature.

Rush looked at the crystals. “No,” he said. “I need them natively configured.”

“This is Dr. Perry’s lab,” Volker said, as though this sentence were meant to have some meaning. “She’s working on modifying the crystals on the assumption that they might function similar to an Ancient hyperdrive element. See, she figured out that the hyperdrive from a—" 

Rush said, “I don’t care.”

Volker’s mouth opened a little. After a second he shut it. “Well,” he said. “I think this is— like— the best approximation of a natively configured DHD on Earth? Because Colonel Carter designed a dialing program, and it’s much more efficient, so we don’t really use one anymore?”

“Are you telling me,” Rush said, “that Stargate Command does not possess a DHD?”

Volker’s mouth performed the same open-and-close motion. “Yes?”

Rush removed his glasses and gave into the impulse to bury his head in his hands. “Please leave.”

“But I—“

“Go.”

Volker went.

Then there was at the very least no one in the lab, which was an improvement. There were only machines emitting amiable sequences of noise.

Rush approached the table.

There were— he counted the rows and columns briefly— seventy-four crystals in total, in an array of unlikely shades. They looked like children’s toys, red and turquoise and yellow. He resisted the impulse to touch one of them and see if it was real. He went to one of the computers and, when his credentials failed to gain him access to the system, he hacked in using Volker’s credentials, which took him ten minutes to obtain on his laptop in sCrypt.

The crystals were wired so that the lab could track amplitude in response to frequencies under different situations of damping. Presumably there were other experiments being run, but that was the one that interested him. The current set-up was designed to work with ultra-low frequencies, far into the subaural range, but Rush altered it until he would hear the audible hum running through the crystals. He tested out several ranges of frequency this way, running them through various configurations of crystals and noting the resultant resonance of the crystals.

This took perhaps longer than he had strictly intended. He wasn’t sure exactly how long because time in general was not important to him. The numbers were suggesting something, like music he could not quite hear, and what it was they were suggesting did not quite seem to coalesce. He sat for a while watching them glow faintly in rhythmic patterns, red and yellow and turquoise and turquoise and red, listening to the mechanical tones that corresponded to the activation. When at last he tired of this, he emailed himself the data over the SGC’s secure server and left the room.

He did not encounter Volker again in the hallway, or anyone who appeared to recognise him, and so he was mercifully able to escape the building without further requisite social interchange.

The outside air was unexpected after the artificial and Arctic-chilly temperatures indoors. This was a problem he had only ever encountered in the American West: an inside that aspired to an entirely separate biome from the one in which it had been built. Colorado Springs hadn’t even the excuse of being high desert, the long stretches of land that America’s colonisers ought never to have settled, but that they seemed determined to terraform to some forgotten norm of England-but-without-all-the-rain.

He missed Scotland and its fuck-you weather.

No. He didn’t miss Scotland.

Did Glasgow even have weather? It was like living in a merciless terrarium. Less an habitat, one might say, than a tank.

Colorado Springs was a nothingness under the mountains. It didn’t aspire to a separate biome; it aspired to nothing. It came from nothing. It was a brief strip mall occupying a high-turnover and pathetic piece of land.

He was indifferent. It didn’t matter to him where he lived.

* * *

He was back on 115 before it occurred to him that he had intended to buy groceries. Irritated, he drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. Another characteristic of Colorado Springs was its sparse population of acceptable grocery stores; he avoided Whole Foods on principle, because it was where he’d shopped in San Francisco, and it was on the other side of town, at any rate. The chief Colorado chain, King Sooper’s, he boycotted out of strong principles concerning nomenclature, which left only the option of the local Safeway.

So. Certainly. Fine. He exited the freeway, parked, and entered the store. He had no objections to shopping at Safeway.

Except that the act of grocery shopping was inherently fraught, the supremest site of ideological trash consumption. What he wanted was simply to purchase food. A loaf of bread, some tins of beans, which would be useless fucking American beans, but bearing some family resemblance to what he knew as beans, and anyway it did not matter what he put in his mouth; he was not interested in the topic. A dozen eggs. Instant coffee. But could he buy a loaf of bread, some tins of beans, a dozens eggs, instant coffee? Could he bollocks. Instead he was sold some fucking self-help video in packaging format, the cheerful fascism of normative self-regulation, the house you were supposed to have, the garden, the body, the farms you were meant to support, fucking _farms_ filled with _chickens_ of all things, the fucking _planet_ you were supposed to want, dictated to you by cardboard fucking egg cartons—

By the time he had completed this thought, he was clutching a carton of milk hard enough to deform it, so he put the carton of milk in the cart and moved on.

That had been the most intolerable characteristic of Young’s apartment. The sad, limp, and half-hearted attempt to participate in the collective jolly affect-policing, the effort to indicate that Young still wanted the right things. The plasma TV where he’d no doubt watch interchangeable sports tournaments of some kind, the broad leather couch on which he’d sit sipping the six-packs of mediocre beer, his free arm carefully positioned to indicate comradely closeness to the men who sat with him, but also positioned so as to never get _too_ close, never to outstep the desire-lines laid down by generations of buttoned-up, gutless, respectocrats.

 Young had an excuse; he was crippled somehow. He could have used that to escape. But instead he’d chosen to stick it out trying to play a game that he’d already lost. He’d get desk duty and spend his life pushing papers. Start an addiction to pain pills, maybe. People would stare at him, wondering what was wrong with him when he tried to stand. He had scars, probably, and probably saw them as defects. A defective body he was stuck with. Not a real man. 

 _Fuck you_ , Rush thought spitefully, and then didn’t know why he was saying it, if he was directing it at Young or voicing it on Young’s behalf.

Young the spy. Well, Rush had kept Jackson out of his apartment for months and had not gone to the fucking symphony with him, so good luck to Young if he thought he was more sophisticated in some respect than Jackson. Not to attribute any particular sophistication to Jackson.

Still, Rush purchased a bottle of apple cider vinegar to give to Young. A sort of “Stay out of my fucking sphere of existence” present, one might say.

* * *

When he pulled into the parking lot of the apartment complex, there was a large black Suburban taking up several spaces. Its engine was idling and its windows were rolled down. The man in the driver’s seat was smoking a cigarette. He gave Rush only a cursory glance, but the scene made Rush oddly uneasy. There was something foreign about the man, something hard to articulate in a reasonable way. It was as though he had never seen someone wait in a car before, and had had to devise his own impromptu style of doing it.

 Rush narrowed his eyes at the man, but he supposed the black Suburban indicated some sort of drugs trafficking endeavour, which he was not particularly interested in.

 He returned to his apartment and unloaded his groceries.

 While he was trying to recall if bread belonged in the refrigerator, or rather if _industrial_ bread belonged in the refrigerator, since they had always bought artisanal loaves from the bakery in San Francisco, the one that displayed its starter in a huge jar on the shelf, and Gloria had cracked open the loaves saying _One of life’s most glorious sounds, and I don’t care if you call me a glutton_ , crust-crumbs spraying everywhere, and—

 While he was trying to recall this, the email client on his laptop chimed. He set the bread on the countertop and opened a message from someone called Dr. Amanda Perry, a name he did not recognise.

  _Dear Dr. Rush,_  
  
_Dr. Volker informs me that he introduced you to my lab this morning. Since he has absolutely no interest in crystal resonance frequencies or activation, I’m going to go ahead and assume that it was you and not him who spent several hours screwing up my array. Thanks for that, by the way. Can you please explain to me why you felt it necessary to erase all my preset damping levels and tamper with my experimental equipment?_  
  
  _Yours sincerely,_  
  _Dr. Amanda Perry._

 Rush sighed and pressed a hand to his temple. He felt a headache beginning to flower. _Dear Dr. Perry_ , he wrote.

 _No. I don’t believe I can explain it to you._  
  
_Dr. Nicholas Rush._

 Since he was already sat at his computer, which was to say that he was already sat on the floor in front of his computer, he opened the data that he had collected from Perry’s lab. He rested his chin on his closed hand and contemplated the window. After a while, he pulled up the sCrypt analysis of the eighth cypher and set the two level to each other.

 The numbers were—

 If you adjusted for—

 Someone knocked on his door.

 He ignored them.

 Assuming a current generated by a standard extraterrestrial power source, something along the lines of a ZPM, the activation levels of the crystals might, if one assumed that the crystals themselves had been configured to resonate at a certain frequency, potentially be—

 “Rush,” Young said from behind the door.

 —in a range that was consistent with the numbers that the eighth segment of cyphertext was producing, which meant— He shut his eyes and considered several possibilities. A series of numbers that did not proceed in order of magnitude, in which the numbers involved each represented a possible state of crystal activation. Presumably he was meant to complete the set? He had wanted the crystals natively configured because the gate assigned each one a specific state, part of a starting permutation; if he began with the standard starting permutation and—

 “Rush. Open the damn door,” Young said, knocking again.

 Rush directed a vituperative glare in the door’s direction.

 If the number series was in fact not really an number series but a map of _certain crystals in their DHD activation states_ , and therefore indicative of an order in which those crystals ought to be accessed, then perhaps the significant problem was not the decryption of the cyphertext but an entirely different problem, namely—

 “Rush,” Young said. Shouted. Bawled. Intruded.

 —a Hamiltonian path problem of some sort, or possibly a cycle problem, in which it was necessary to find a route for a current through natively configured crystals, producing very precise levels of activation and thereby triggering a program that was complementary to the cypher, in which case—

 The knocking would not cease.

 “ _What,”_ Rush hissed, when he finally flung the door open.

 “Hey,” Young said, unperturbed. He was wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. Perhaps the _same_ black t-shirt and jeans.

 “I,” Rush said with as much control as he could muster, “am _working._ ”

“I said I was gonna knock on your door today. Just to make sure you weren’t dead.”

 “And now you’ve done so. Congratulations.” Rush began to close the door.

 Young stuck his foot in the crack to prevent it from closing. “Yeah, but I thought—“

 “Oh, you thought, did you? A novel experience, I’m certain.”

 “It seemed like maybe you were having trouble keeping up with, you know, what do people call it these days. Self-care.”

 Rush shut his eyes for a moment and leant his forehead against the doorframe. “Self-care,” he echoed, flat and incredulous.

“Yeah, my PT gal was big on that. Eating right. Resting. Showering when you’re supposed to. Not drinking half a bottle of bourbon and wallowing in a pit of misery.” Young smiled what was no doubt intended to be a disarming smile, one that would nullify all reasonable resistance.

Rush was not susceptible to it. “I’m sure that must be very useful advice for someone who has suffered a career-ending injury,” he said. “And for someone whose wife has left him, or rather _not_ left him, as it appears that you, in this case, were the one forced to leave. However, I am quite capable of adequately caring for myself.”

Young’s expression faltered, and there was a moment when Rush even noted, with interest, a flash of something else there: despair, perhaps, or violence. Disappointingly, however, the violence vanished quickly, smoothed under an amiable mask of composure. “Well, you’re right about one thing,” he said. “It was pretty damn useful advice for me. And I could use some help, so what do you say about cooking me dinner?”

“Absolutely not,” Rush said, and attempted to close the door on Young’s foot.

Young didn’t move. “Come on,” he said. “I’m hungry, and without you, I’m just gonna nuke a Lean Cuisine. _Plus_ , if you come over, I’ll tell you what I talked to General Landry about today.”

“As reassured as I am to see that you treat your security clearance with the degree of seriousness it merits, I—“

“It was about you,” Young said.

Rush narrowed his eyes. “What?” 

“We had a long chat.” 

“Why would General Landry speak to _you_ about _me?_ ”

“Because I’m a spy, obviously. Isn’t that what you decided?” Young leaned against the outside wall, looking amused.

“You _are_ a spy,” Rush said. But his vitriol was waning in the face of information he wanted, and he knew that Young could see it.

Young said, mock-serious, “I won’t even try to make you drink beer or talk football. Cross my heart.”

Rush glared at him. “I obtained apple cider vinegar,” he said without moving from the doorway. “To supplement your barely adequate kitchen. I don’t suppose you’ve acquired an immersion blender in the past twenty-four hours.”

“I’m gonna be honest with you; I don’t really know what that is.”

“I’m locking you out while I retrieve the apple cider vinegar from my kitchen.”

Young shut his eyes for a millisecond longer than was necessary, the merest overtone of irritation. “Sure,” he said. “Can’t risk me stealing the kilts and golf clubs, or whatever the hell you’ve got stashed in here.” 

Rush stared at him in silence for a long, incredulous second before closing the door in Young’s face and locking it.

Fucking Young, he thought as he padded across the hardwood floor to the kitchen. He was wearing socks and he had no memory of taking off his shoes. Fuck shoes. Shoes were a normative imposition, always assuming that one was not traversing surfaces of uneven temperature or texture, and why the fuck had humans decided as a global phenomenon to decondition their feet?

He was not going to expend time and effort locating his shoes, he decided.

The apple cider vinegar was waiting on the counter. Rush seized it in a gesture turned choppy by bad temper. 

When he had unlocked the door again, he shoved the bottle into Young’s hands.

“Thanks,” Young said, looking down at it with mild bemusement. “You realise I have no idea what to do with this.”

“I’m sure you can come up with a few creative places to shove it,” Rush replied, his voice cultured to sugared perfection. He maneuvered Young aside with an efficiency of movement so that he could leave his apartment and lock the door behind him.

“Nice,” Young said. “You know you’re not wearing shoes?”

Rush cast a withering glance at him and didn’t reply.

“I’m thinking of starting a new policy,” Young said. He was unlocking his apartment door. “No shirt, no shoes, no service.”

“I think you’ll find that I’m the one who’s doing _you_ the fucking service.”

“I’m just saying.”

“You’re going to decline to accept my service? I should be so lucky.” With a suspicious squint, Rush acquiesced to Young’s gesture of welcome. 

He made sure not to lift his feet as he entered the apartment, just enough to genteelly draw Young’s attention attention again to the slip and slide of his stocking feet.

* * *

An hour later, Rush was part-way into constructing a dish of egg yolk gnocchi sauteed in a sriracha parmesan sauce, using supermarket olive oil and Young’s inferior fucking industrial brand of parmesan. The parmesan had not been previously present in Young’s kitchen— someone had done a second shop for the man. It was obvious that Young had not shopped for himself, as there were now frozen vegetables in the freezer, but equally obvious that whoever had done so had little to no culinary ambition, as the vegetables in question consisted of cheery bags of carrots, cauliflower, and garden peas. Probably Mitchell, Rush decided, the equally white-bread but marginally more functional element of the set of colonels. 

A microwave had also appeared on the counter. But Rush had, to his equal irritation and absorption, been required to construct his own improvised sous vide cooker using Young’s beer cooler, an electric kettle, and a handful of Ziploc bags. This process Young observed with fascination, leaning against the kitchen island with a bottle of sub-par beer in his hand.

“So this is pasta?” Young asked, watching as Rush extracted the water-sealed bags of gnocchi segments.

“Classically, pasta requires the presence of a wheat flour; however, functionally, let us say: yes.” Bright yellow squares— or, all right, polygons, given their minute irregularities— collected in the frying pan as Rush emptied the bags.

“So why do you have to cook it in my beer cooler? Why can’t you just boil it?” 

Rush fixed him with a level glare before turning his attention to the task of ensuring that the gnocchi were evenly sauced.

“That look you keep giving me— you realise that look doesn’t mean you win the conversation, right?” Young cocked an eyebrow.

“Doesn’t it?” Rush didn’t look up from the frying pan.

“That’s not how conversations work, hotshot.”

Rush inspected a piece of gnocchi closely. The parmesan had melted nicely into the sauce’s olive oil base, and cooking had thickened the mixture until it clung to the smooth texture of the not-classically-pasta. “The conversational model doesn’t interest me, I’m afraid.”

“What, you don’t have conversations?”

“As infrequently as possible.”

Young frowned and took a swig from his drink. 

There was a brief silence.

Rush calculated the odds that the silence would last. They were not in his favour. In this, as in so many other endeavors, he was proven unendurably correct.

“You don’t have conversations,” Young said.

“Do you suffer from some disorder of repetition?”

Young ignored him. “You don’t wear shoes.”

“Unsurprisingly, there is a fallacy lurking behind that statement.”

“You don’t sleep on couches.” 

“There, you see; your inferences are improving.”

“You don’t do neighbours.”

“Certainly not in the colloquial sense.” Rush lifted the frying pan from the stove and carefully aliquoted its rather alarmingly sunrise-coloured mixture onto two depressing plastic plates. He tossed more of the toxic parmesan across the top of each and shoved one in Young’s direction. “I have fulfilled the terms of your absurd manipulation. _Cibotom iam cucuecuetor._ ”

Young took the plate, but didn’t set it on the counter. He was giving Rush a strange look. “What is that, Latin?”

“Ancient,” Rush said, stabbing a piece of gnocchi. “Draw more reasonable conclusions.” 

“How is _Latin_ a less reasonable conclusion than a million-year-old alien— you know what, forget about it.” Young favoured Rush with a dark, glowering look that seemed naturally suited to his underdeveloped features. He gave the impression of a middle-aged thug whose face had been shaped by the heel of more than one boot. “So you don’t—“

“I don’t _cook_ for people without the promise of immediate clarification,” Rush said. He took a savage bite out of the gnoccho. It was meaty, spicy, and perfectly al dente. “How did General Landry see fit to direct your daily campaign of espionage?”

Young rolled his eyes at this. “Do you even know why they’ve got people looking out for you? _Real_ people, I mean, not just me— people on active duty down in the basement.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“It would sound a hell of a lot more likely if you’d paid attention during your security briefing, which apparently you failed to do.”

Rush tightened his lips and speared another gnocco with undue violence, irritated by the vague and sudden sense that he had, indeed, been told something about a security team stationed in the basement of the building, and that he might have been contemplating polynomial interpolation at the time. “How the American military chooses to misuse what is, frankly, an obscenity of a budget is a topic I rate as of low-to-middling personal interest, so if you—“

“You’re supposed to call them if you’re going to leave the building, you know.” Now Young was levelling a serious look at him, or rather a look that aspired to be serious. On Young it looked comical. Perhaps less a thug, Rush decided, than a sort of very hardbitten teddy bear. 

“I agreed to no such condition.”

“Well, actually you did; it was part of your employment agreement, and you signed on the dotted line.”

Rush set his fork down very carefully on the island’s countertop. It was a cheap fork, the sort designed to look expensive and sold individually, not as part of a set. He stared at it. “I won’t be _monitored,_ ” he said in a dangerous voice.

“Apparently you up and disappeared today for, like, forty-five minutes.”

“I went _grocery shopping_.”

“Your security team says it’s not the first time you’ve pulled this shit.”

Rush picked up the fork again and weighed it in his hand. The tines were smooth from lack of use. The handle was narrow, which provided the illusion of design.

Young was still talking. “—And then General Landry calls _me_ , which means that none of us are really having any fun, so everyone would really kind of prefer it if you’d just—“

Rush hurled the fork across the room.

Young stopped talking.

Rush’s hand was shaking slightly with some nervous energy that perhaps he had meant to expel in the force of the throw. He didn’t look to see where the fork had landed. He shoved his plate away from him. “Perhaps _you_ can tell General Landry,” he said, very very evenly and politely, “that _I_ would _really kind of prefer it_ if he would just _leave me the fuck alone_.”

Young tilted his head. Once again Rush was not quite sure what the man was thinking. His eyes had the disturbing effect of appearing sympathetic when they almost certainly were not. A combination thug-teddy-bear. A teddy-bear-thug. He had opted again, not unreasonably, for silence.

Rush shoved away from the island. “I’m going home.” 

Young’s hand caught his wrist as he passed and held him there briefly: a hot brand that hurt the hard edge of Rush’s ulna. Rush twisted, trying to get away from the grip.

“Rush,” Young said. “You realise you’re top of the Lucian Alliance’s list of targets, right? Their Top Ten Most Wanted, is what Mitchell calls it.”

“Let go of me,” Rush said.

Young didn’t. “Didn’t anybody tell you that?”

They hadn’t. Or possibly they had; Rush didn’t really remember. He hadn’t been interested. _Yes, yes,_ he’d said impatiently. _I’m sure all of this vital information can be delivered in writing._ But whenever they sent him documents, he delivered the documents unopened to an empty cardboard box in the corner, where they were currently amassing themselves into a sort of dense and highly classified drift.

“Do you even know who the Lucian Alliance is?” Young asked.

They didn’t have to do with the _cyphers_ , was the thing, that was the problem— those documents, they didn’t have to do with the cyphers, and so they seemed somehow fundamentally remote to Rush. What was real was the world of integer series, Enigma machines, add-rotate-XORs; Ancient numerals and the scrolling ivory lines of sCrypt. He dreamed in 27-trit segments and awoke startled by the input his brain was receiving, which didn’t come in easily readable streams.

Young said, “The Lucian Alliance is—“

“Some unimpressive gang of spacefaring humanoids,” Rush said shortly. “Peddling psychotropic corn. Yes, I’ve heard. I’m unimpressed.”

Young’s hand tightened. There was something in his eyes that Rush didn’t like. “I know it sounds that way,” he said. “When you’re here on Earth, and the biggest threat you have to deal with is the fucking _air conditioning_ in your apartment, but this threat is _real_ , Rush; it is a _very real threat_ , and—“ 

Rush jerked away abruptly, mustering all his body weight to do so and stumbling backwards, almost falling on the embarrassing light green shag rug. “Fuck you,” he said, a little shakily. “What the fuck do a bunch of low-rent, leather-clad aliens want with _me_ , anyway?” 

“I don’t know,” Young said. The thing in his eyes had deepened; his brow had furrowed slightly. “I don’t know, and I don’t like not knowing. That’s why you have a security team in the basement, though, and transport scramblers in the building. That’s why I’m here, for all that I’ve been told, which is _not much_ , because this is a high-level threat, this is a really— you have to take this seriously, Rush.” 

Rush had no intention of taking it seriously. However, it was difficult for him to turn away from Young’s expression. It was obvious that _Young_ took the threat seriously. Rush could not immediately apprehend the reasons either for Young’s interference in his mode of existence or for the darkness that had settled into the crevices of Young’s face, and perhaps this— this perplexity, his failure to read the situation— was what compelled him not to bolt for the door. “All I want,” he said, crossing his arms hard across his chest and not looking at Young, “is to be left alone to work on the fucking cyphers.” 

Young’s face didn’t alter. “That’s not going to happen,” he said. “Not the way you want. But the SGC’s going to be a hell of a lot less on your back if you just fucking follow the protocols when you go shopping and _call_ them.”

“I’ll consider it,” Rush said, his voice clipped. 

“Do you even know who to call?”

Rush made a disdainful gesture. “I assume I can look it up in the fucking yellow pages, given the level of infosec I’ve encountered." 

“It’s dispatch,” Young said, refusing to acknowledge the jab. “You ought to have their number in your phone.”

Making an abrupt decision, Rush pushed past him and sought a glimpse of the fork he’d launched from the kitchen. It lay tine-side up on the hardwood, not far from the balcony door. He picked it up and inspected it for damage.“I need a new fork,” he said.

“ _Is_ their number in your phone?”

“Then again, I’m not opposed to eating with my fingers. I assumed it would offend your military sensibilities, is all.”

“Do you _have_ a phone?”

Rush had crossed the room. He pitched the fork into the sink. “Of course I have a fucking phone,” he said. “I’m a mathematician, I’m not a bloody OAP." 

“I don’t know what that means,” Young said, sounding weary.

Rush extracted another fork from the drawer that had somewhat optimistically been assigned to house Young’s scant cutlery. With an air that he hoped communicated the extent of his aggravation, he resumed his position at the kitchen island and skewered a piece of gnocchi. “Yes. I have a phone.”

“I’ll put the number in your phone. Toss it over.”

“ _I_ am not going to allow _you_ to touch my phone,” Rush said.

Young closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Rush.”

Rush chewed ferociously at the gnocco. It had started to go cold.

“What if I were a Lucian Alliance operative?”

“In that case, I don’t imagine we’d be having this conversation, which would be a bloody relief, let me—“

“What if I were kidnapping you?”

“Then perhaps I could stab you with this fork.” Rush considered the fork, divested of its foodstuff. The idea of stabbing Young was not wholly unappealing. A very minor puncture, perhaps, just enough to act as a deterrent. Just enough to illustrate a boundary point separating their ontological regions.

“Can you just give me your phone?” Young asked, rather plaintively.

Rush’s jaw worked. He set the fork down. “Fine,” he said, because Young was not going to stop asking. He retrieved it from his pocket, unlocked it, and slid it across the counter.

 Young keyed something into it in silence. “I’m giving you my number, too,” he said at last, looking up. “Just in case.” 

“Ah. I see,” Rush said in a tone of exquisite politeness. “You’re attempting to account for all potential future configurations of matter, including those so unlikely and remote that they lead to a universe in which I find myself in need of a crippled divorcé who’s so lonely he corrals people he doesn’t know into cooking him dinner, because then he can pretend at least—“

In a sharp, abrupt motion, Young thrust the phone back at him. It skidded on the marble and stuck halfway.

“Fuck you,” Young said. His voice was quiet, actually; not as loud as Rush might have expected. “I was trained to withstand torture. You know that, right?”

 Rush made a scornful sound under his breath.

“That’s my job,” Young said, as though he hadn’t heard it. His face was artificially calm, empty, impassive. “My job, my actual fucking job; they send me in to take the hurt when someone’s got to get hurt and people like you can’t take it, because I’m _trained_ for it, so if you think your unbelievably transparent and pathetic attempts to get under my skin, your snickering little _wordplays_ are going to do what the bitch head of Sixth House, a knife, and a fucking Goa’uld pain stick spent two days trying to pull off and still didn’t— they still—“ 

He broke off, twisting his head away, and didn’t resume the sentence. 

Rush couldn’t look at him.

After a moment, he picked up his phone and stared at it.

Since it was apparently a requirement that he possess a lockscreen, he had chosen a photograph of a Glasgow lamppost forged in the shape of the city’s coat of arms: the fish with a ring in its mouth and a quartet of tree branches sprouting from its back, a bird resting atop the highest of the tree branches and the lowest unbowed by the weight of a bell.

       _Here is the bird that never flew._  
      _Here is the tree that never grew._  
      _Here is the bell that never rang._  
      _Here is the fish that never swam._

That was how the rhyme went.

He liked the image because it meant nothing. It was a picture of a place where he had lived once. There didn’t have to be any more to it than that. When he looked at it, he felt nothing, which was what he had wanted.

“I’m going to assume it’s a compliment,” Rush said at last, “that my conversation doesn’t rise to the level of torture.”

Young let out a breath. It sounded almost like a laugh. “Well,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, you always give it a pretty good shot.”

“Nice to be appreciated,” Rush said.

Young picked up his fork, a little uncertainly. He looked down at his plate. “I don’t know what the hell I’m eating,” he said.

Rush said, “That doesn’t surprise me.”

There was a pause as Young sampled the gnocchi. “Tastes okay,” he said.

“I accept your ringing endorsement.” Rush picked up his own fork and, echoing the uncertainty of Young’s movements for reasons that he found, intolerably, he could not name, he too resumed the meal.

* * *

“What I was saying before,” Young said, later, when Rush had finished washing the dishes— a task he had undertaken because he couldn’t trust Young to succeed at the simplest domestic endeavor; given his blind arrogance and the inadequacy of his information, he would probably scrub the coating of the frying pan right off, which, admittedly might lead to the purchase of a cast iron skillet, a far superior implement, though one that Young was equally likely to destroy.

Rush paused on the cusp of the doorway. “Yes?” He had been in the process of departing, already reconfiguring his mind, readying it to make the transition from the slow, uncertain fumblings of Young’s locutions, the forced homeliness of his apartment, and inadvertent intimacy of warm water on dishes.

That last had kindled limbic elements that he had not ever wanted kindled again. A kind of violence that was not violence. Or had it always been violence and the response to it? The obverse, as it were. The balancing act.

He had offered to wash the dishes, not knowing whether he hoped that Young would say no.

“You don’t do neighbors. You don’t sleep on couches. You don’t have conversations. It seems like you define yourself in the negative an awful lot.”

Young had a stupid, hesitant, amiable expression plastered across his stupid, hesitant, amiable face. Rush was struck by the impulse to eradicate it, an abrupt and perhaps irrational surge of violence. He looked away.

“Fuck off,” he said. “I’m uninterested in your two-bit psychoanalysis.”

Young’s eyebrows drew together even more stupidly. “Look, I’m just trying to say—“

“And I said,” Rush said, slamming the door open with more force than was strictly needed, “I’m not interested. Go file your little report to Landry. Tell him whatever you want to tell him.”

“I don’t file reports,” Young said, looking confused.

“And don’t bother me again.”

“I don’t file reports on you, Rush, Jesus—“

Rush exited the apartment and, in an effort to establish symmetry, also slammed the door behind him.

He stood in the hall for a moment, fighting the urge to curl his hands into fists. The light overhead was flickering in a way that, had the fixture been outdoors, would have been certain to draw moths. But this was indoors, safe and sterile, even if a beetle occasionally perforated the defenses. And so, when the moment had passed, Rush turned to go home.


	5. Chapter 5

Young was standing out on the balcony, watching planes blink their way over the mountains. He angled a bottle of beer against his mouth, condensation smearing his face in the hot dusk, and gripped his phone in his other hand.

“I don’t know,” he said when he had swallowed. “I just feel like there’s something wrong with him, you know?”

“I think there’s something wrong with _you_ ,” Mitchell said on the other end of the phone.

Young rolled his eyes. “Right. Okay. Thanks. That’s really helpful.”

Mitchell laughed his weird Kansas cornpone laugh. “I don’t know what you want me to say, man. He’s a geek. There’s something wrong with all of them. You think Jackson is normal? Hell, no. That man doesn’t have a brain, he’s got a cave full of bats.”

“He did _die_ ,” Young pointed out. “Like— a couple of times.”

“Like that’s an excuse? Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, but _try_ having a conversation with him at, like, a less-than-cosmic level.”

“Yeah, well, Rush _doesn’t do_ conversations, apparently,” Young said. “As a rule. And he used my beer cooler to cook pasta, if you can believe it, although I guess that was kind of awesome.”

“What did it taste like?” Mitchell asked.

“I don’t know. Weirdly spicy. He gave me a bottle of apple cider vinegar, too. I think it was supposed to be an insult. That’s why Landry called me, actually.”

“Because Rush bought you apple cider vinegar?”

“Apparently he doesn’t do security protocols, either. Keeps going MIA every time he leaves his apartment, which, like, never happens, so, you know, _that_ sounds healthy. I don’t get why Landry hasn’t just brought him in already.”

“Like on base?” Mitchell paused. “I mean, I can think of one pretty good reason.”

Young closed his eyes and set his beer down on the plastic balcony table. He brought his hand up and massaged his temple, pushing aside the overgrown thicket of his hair. “The leak.”

“The leak,” Mitchell agreed. “SG-11 turned in their report on that beaming technology they saw the LA using last week, and they’re like, 98% certain it came from us. Which means that whoever is feeding information to them, it’s got to be someone high-up, with access to a lot of classified material, making the odds pretty damn good that we know the sucker.”

“Either that, or we _are_ the sucker,” Young said, leaning forwards and letting his elbows rest against the railing. “One of us.”

Below him, a car pulled into the parking lot, and he watched as the driver— a medium-built guy, maybe Air Force, in a hoodie and baseball cap, unloaded a paper bag of groceries, probably from Trader Joe’s or some place where they still actually you that kind of sack. The guy’s face looked absent and unworried. Young wondered if he was with the program and then thought he probably wasn’t, because no one who was with the program looked like that. Not even Sheppard, in Pegasus, with his magical city that he could fly away from danger. Young thought if _he_ were in Pegasus, away from this Lucian Alliance bullshit and the war with the Ori, away from having to worry about the whole population of the Earth and only having his own so-goddamn-breakable body to do it with, then maybe _he_ would have looked like that, but Sheppard didn’t.

Mitchell said into the silence, flatly, “Yeah. So you see what I mean. There’s a lot of people who’d like Rush nice and cozy in a bunker. But it’s maybe not the best idea to stick him in the one place where we _know_ there’s someone’s out to get him. Your building’s got signal scramblers, so they’re not going to be able to beam him out, even if they’ve got his transponder query code— which we better _hope_ they don’t, because if they’ve got his, they’ve got _everyone’s—_ and they’re not going to risk sweeping for him, because they want him in one piece. Beyond that— I mean, that’s what the team in the basement’s for, right?”

“Right,” Young said. “The team in the basement and me.”

He’d meant it as a joke, but it just came out weary. He turned away from the looming dark of the mountains, collected his beer, and headed indoors. He’d left the lights on throughout the whole apartment, maybe out of some pathetic sense that if he did he wouldn’t feel so alone, but he felt more alone, even with Mitchell a rustling presence on the phone in his hand.

“I mean, you never know,” Mitchell said. “Maybe Rush’s got the right idea. The more he disappears, the harder he is to track down, right? Otherwise he’s just— available for abduction.”

“Yeah, but there’s no way the Alliance is that wired into our shit. Monitoring communications as they come in, minute-to-minute? They don’t have the manpower.”

“You hope,” Mitchell said grimly.

“Right,” Young said, and he was going to say, And you better hope that too, because without that we’ve got absolutely _nothing._ But he was cut off by the lights in his apartment flickering off and on so rapidly he thought he’d only blinked for a second. He might have gone on believing that if he hadn’t heard the unsteady hum of appliances restarting their cycles.

Mitchell had picked up on his silence. “What?”

“Probably nothing,” Young said. “Just— the power flickered for a second.”

“And?”

Mitchell was sharp. He could hear it in Young’s voice, probably, an undertone of hesitation.

“Nothing concrete,” Young said, but he was already heading to his bedroom, just in case, his fingers curling convulsively as his hand itched for a gun. “But there was a guy in a black SUV hanging out in the parking lot earlier. I had a bad feeling about it. Could be the feds, but—“

“But maybe you should call down to the basement,” Mitchell said, echoing back Young’s own hesitation. “Just to make sure the team’s answering.”

Normally the sight of the bedroom, with its haphazard landscape of half-empty cardboard boxes, clothes hanging limply out of some of them, and its unmade bed would have made Young feel exhausted. There was an exhilaration to being able to ignore the whole backdrop as he limped to the nightstand, pulling his sidearm and holster out, affixing the holster to his waist and checking the gun’s clip.

“Yeah,” he said to Mitchell. “Let me call you—“

Whatever he had planned to say next vanished as the power cut out and left him in darkness.

In the dark, the apartment’s emptiness had a different character. He could hear his own breathing, and Mitchell breathing on the other end of the phone. He had never been more aware that Mitchell was miles away, probably fifteen minutes’ distance.

“V?” Mitchell said. “What’s happening?”

“The power’s out,” Young said, trying to keep his voice low. “Pretty sure the backup generators are down, too. I’m going for Rush. Call it in.”

He ended the call and shoved the phone in his pocket, wrapping the hand thus freed at the square base of his Beretta. It was good. It felt good. Just like that, the stance and movements required to clear a room came back naturally to him. He felt a pulsing uplift of satisfaction that hadn’t been there in months; he hadn’t realized, he thought, that _this_ was what he was missing, some part of this that overrode the hard pain from moving fast on his injured hip.

He moved swiftly through the dark apartment, from the hall and around the bulk of the kitchen island, peering through the thin slants of moonlight that the windows fed in from outside.

At the front door he stopped, because he had thought as far ahead as extracting Rush from Rush’s apartment. He would _need_ to extract Rush from his apartment, as quickly and as silently as he could, but Rush was not going to be in favor of that happening. They hadn’t parted on great terms, and it took a full-on hostage negotiation to get Rush out of his apartment on a good day.

He felt in the dark across the top of the cardboard box still sitting by the doorway, till his hand met a half-used roll of duct tape. He had to fumble at it to find the shredded edge, then peel it back.

He slid the door open and slipped through it to cross the hall.

As he’d been afraid, Rush didn’t answer his door on the first knock. Or the second.

“Rush,” Young whispered at last, urgently, and waited.

No reply.

“Rush, _open the door._ ”

Nothing.

He didn’t think Rush was sleeping. He hadn’t gotten the impression Rush slept that much.

“Rush, I will break this door down; I swear to God.”

At last the lock clicked.

He was prepared when it did; he’d weighed speed over safety, and holstered his Beretta for a second, so that when Rush opened the door, he could react quickly: raising the tape and slapping a line of it over his mouth, grabbing his wrist to jerk him forwards and pin him in a pretty good hold.

Rush made a furious muffled sound and tried to slap Young off him.

“ _Shut up_ ,” Young hissed. “I’m trying to save your life!”

Rush didn’t seem to accept this justification. He jabbed an elbow into Young’s side. Young had thought that, even injured, he’d be able to get Rush into his own apartment easily— after all, it was just a couple of steps across the hall. But Rush had decided he _was not crossing that hall_ , and was squirming, flailing, kicking, fighting. Not, it had to be said, very well, but with a sort of street-kid determination to land a blow any way he was able.

“ _Rush_ ,” Young bit out, trying to stay quiet. “ _Cut it out._ ”

Rush’s response to this was to stomp on Young’s foot.

Having to bite back the streak of swearing that would have normally been his first reaction to that was enough of a distraction that Young almost missed the furtive sound at the end of the hallway.

Almost.

He brought his sidearm up half on instinct as a door creaked open at the end of the hall, right under where an emergency EXIT sign should have been glowing red but wasn’t, which meant that the backup generators _were_ down, and the transport signal scramblers, probably, and—

Someone was coming through that door, and they were moving slow, reconnaissance-careful. Young braced the Beretta against Rush’s shoulder, tightening his grip around the man.

The figure paused. A brief hesitation. Had they seen Young?

Rush made a sound.

 _Dammit_ , Young thought, and had time to hear the chirp of a zat arming before he dragged Rush towards the wall and fired.

The noise was astonishing, explosive, and seemed to deafen more than one of his senses. A high-pitched ringing in his ears made him want to reel. The air pressed against him, thick as well as dark.

Someone in a nearby apartment shouted, maybe startled from sleep; an unseen door slammed open, loud enough for him to hear.

All the sounds seemed to come from underwater.

Under the weight of Young’s arm, Rush had stopped fighting. Stunned, Young thought. Young could feel Rush’s pulse beating hard in his chest.

Whoever it was at the end of the hall wasn’t moving, but there would be more of them coming, fast.

Young sucked in a breath and dragged Rush— who might not have been fighting, but who wasn’t really helping, either— across those last few feet, into his apartment.

For some reason he was stupidly surprised when the high-pitched ringing didn’t cut off when he shut the door. He had to stand there for a second, remembering how guns worked, remembering that it was in his head, and that he didn’t need to hear to organize a tactically advantageous position. He knew the building; he had to take stock of the exits and—

Rush, who had apparently recovered some of his wits, took advantage of Young’s preoccupation to make a dazed, indignant sound and stomp on Young’s foot again.

“Ow!” Young hissed, probably louder than he’d meant to. “What the fuck?”

Rush made a louder noise.

“Yeah, well, if I take the tape off your mouth and let you go, are you going to shut up and let me handle this?”

The noise Rush made in response to that could charitably have been described as a growl, so Young wasn’t feeling confident.

“I think we’re going to stick with this for now,” he said.

Then, because he was going to need to barricade the doorway, he wrestled Rush’s wrists behind his back and wrapped some tape around them. He had a feeling that it wouldn’t hold Rush forever, maybe not even for very long, but at least it bought him some time to start moving boxes. He was closing off their main escape route, but at two stories up they could always go off the balcony, and he was sure as hell hoping that Mitchell would show up with the cavalry before the situation got that advanced. With any luck, the confusion his gunshot had set off would give him some cover, and if it came down to it, he could stop the LA from getting in for a while.

Rush, of course, didn’t really appreciate this gesture. His first strategy was pretty much limited to kicking Young’s legs, which hurt like hell, but wasn’t anything Young couldn’t handle. Then he apparently decided that he was better off trying to find a way to cut his hands loose, so he started fumbling awkwardly around the room. Young figured that was a good way for him to keep himself occupied while Young himself focused on more important shit, like monitoring the hallway through the door’s peephole.

The two of them were distracted from their respective pursuits when Young’s phone went off, vibrating with a text message alert.

Young checked the phone. The text was from Mitchell: _Jackson’s head?_

 _A cave full of bats_ , Young typed back, because Mitchell was checking to make sure that he was still the one in control of his phone.

 _On the way_ , Mitchell sent. _Possible cloaked ship @ you. Status?_

Young glanced at Rush and frowned. _Rush w/ me my apt,_ he sent. _Shots fired civs in bldg._

He realized his ears were still ringing, and that this was why the world felt so muffled. He shook his head, trying to clear it, and couldn’t.

He wondered what was happening on the building’s ground floor.

Finally his phone buzzed again. _Beaming Telford yr apt,_ Mitchell’s message read. _Confirm?_

That, it had to be admitted, made Young shut his eyes for a second.

But it was midnight, and he’d just shot a man in his hallway, and he had to make sure that fucking _Rush_ , who had made his way into the kitchen now and appeared to be trying to pry the cutlery drawer open to get at a knife, stayed alive and on Earth until morning, and presumably until the next morning, and the one after that.

So: _Confirm_ , he texted back, and then he said, “Rush, I swear to God, if you open that drawer, I’m going to tape you to a barstool.”

Unseen zat fire was suddenly audible. Then: gunshots.

Someone screamed outside in the hallway, short and sharp.

A column of light cut through the air of Young’s apartment, and David was there.

As usual, Young felt punched in the stomach by his presence. At first he saw him only from the back, that straight and somewhat triangular silhouette of shoulders, hips, and waist that Young knew the underlying surface and texture of with both hands.

Then David turned, and they studied each other for a moment.

David looked good; he looked— crisp, but then he always looked crisp, like nothing ever really touched him, or at least not enough to mess with his posture or his uniform pleats. His hair was neat and soft and his eyes were dark, and there was something in them that Young had never been able to name, only put an adjective to: _intense_. Intense what? He didn’t know. He’d thought, maybe, that he would find out one day.

He wanted to touch David, but at the same time he felt— agitated. Miserable. He didn’t even want to keep looking, but he couldn’t look away.

So it was David who averted his gaze first, abruptly, and drew his gun, gesturing with it towards Rush, who was still fumbling around in the kitchen. “What the hell?”

Young shrugged, relieved that the tension had been broken. “He declined to cooperate.”

“So you kidnapped him?”

“It seemed easier, at the time, than having a fifteen-minute debate.”

David shook his head. His mouth was curled in amusement. “You’ve got to admit, Nick,” he said to Rush, “you bring this shit on yourself.”

Rush glared furiously at him.

It surprised Young for some reason that David and Rush were on a first-name basis. He thought about it as he watched David set his bag down and pull a set of portable scramblers out of it, then start setting them around the perimeters of the living room. He hadn’t even known that Rush and David knew each other, really. He found the idea oddly disquieting.

“So,” David said, after a while, when it had become noticeable that he wasn’t talking to Young and Young wasn’t talking to him. “There’s just no keeping you out of trouble, is there, Everett?”

Young made a short sound, not quite a laugh. “Really? That’s the conversation we’re having?”

David shot him an unreadable look. “What kind of conversation would you like to have?”

Young shook his head. He looked down at the gun in his hand. It still felt warm. _He_ felt warm. And still that ringing. “I don’t— You know what? Nothing. Never mind.”

“That’s what I thought.” David hit a button and the scramblers lit up blue in the corners, humming.

When he straightened, he seemed to catch sight of Rush again, and said, “Oh, for the love of Christ, come here already, would you?”

Rush shuffled sullenly over, briefly giving Young a look that could have stripped paint. He had to stand patiently while David pulled out a pocketknife and slit the the tape that was holding his wrists together. Only then could he rip the tape off his mouth, a sequence of events that probably seemed like an overthought, but definitely wasn’t, because Young knew David, and that was David all over, helping you, but still making sure you were a little bit under control.

Predictably, when Rush had finally gotten the tape off his mouth, the first thing he burst out with was: “I want him brought up on charges!”

He was pointing a furious and unsteady finger at Young.

“For what?” David returned, turning back to his bag without sparing Rush a single glance. “Saving your goddamn life?”

“I won’t be treated like a fucking briefcase that you can sling over your shoulder and cart about from one place to another!”

“I did not,” Young said, “for the record, sling him over my shoulder.”

Rush fixed him with a poisonous look.

Telford’s radio fritzed, and then someone, Reynolds, Young thought, was saying, “Sir, we’ve disabled three individuals with Lucian insignia in Dr. Rush’s apartment, and secured the basement security station. We could use some additional manpower to clear the whole building. We should have power restored in—“

The lights came back on, with a slightly questioning hum and a clicking sound. Young blinked, unaccustomed by now to anything stronger than the blue glow from the scramblers.

“—Well. Now,” Reynolds said. “Awaiting your orders, Colonel.”

“Secure the prisoners and rendezvous with me at Rush’s apartment,” Telford said into the radio. “I’m assuming temporary command of SG-3. Over and out.”

“Really?” Young said skeptically. “You’re hunting down Lucian footsoldiers now? Seems like kind of small fry for you.”

He told himself he wasn’t longing to follow David out that door— that he didn’t feel like if David asked him to do it, the pain would vanish from his back and hip and he’d straighten up, undamaged suddenly. Like the screws would melt into bone if David touched him again.

“Yeah, well,” David said, producing some kind of pneumatic injector, “I’ve got a personal interest.”

“What the hell does _that_ mean?”

But David wasn’t listening. He’d turned back towards Rush, who was sulking over by the kitchen island with his arms folded across his chest. “Nick,” he said. “C’mere, I need your arm.”

“No,” Rush said, not moving. “Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“Fuck you.”

David sighed. “Jesus, would you believe I almost thought I missed you?”

Rush was unmoved. “No. I wouldn’t.”

“How do you know? You’re such a fucking misanthrope. Give me your arm.”

Rush, Young noticed, was wearing only a thin white t-shirt and the same rumpled jeans he’d worn to dinner. Clearly, he hadn’t been asleep when Young had knocked.

“I don’t take orders,” Rush said, looking thunderous. “And certainly not from you.”

“It’s not fucking poison. It’s an implantable chip. Carter designed it; it encrypts your transponder signal so that if the LA have the query code, they still can’t get a lock on it. Good for me, good for you. You’ve got one chip already; why not double or nothing?”

Rush didn’t really look convinced. He stared at the pneumatic injector, worrying his lip, his brow creasing.

“You know, you do, technically, take orders,” David said. Something in his stance shifted slightly, just for a second, just enough for Young to suddenly see that David had been trying, this whole time, to seem unthreatening to Rush, or— maybe Rush genuinely brought out that stance in him; maybe Rush didn’t threaten David, but it was hard to tell.

Nothing had ever changed about him around Young. They had always stayed soldiers.

Rush lifted his face, challenging, hostile.

“So if I have to act to protect an asset against his own fucked-up judgment—” David let the sentence hang, unfinished, accentuated with just the hint of that buried threat.

“—Fine,” Rush said curtly.

“—Then I’m more than willing to do that.”

“I said: _fine._ ” Rush held out his hand. “Give it here.”

David dropped the injector into Rush’s palm. Rush inspected it for a moment and then placed it against his upper arm. It gave a faint hiss as it discharged, and Rush flinched.

“ _Thank_ you,” David said when Rush handed the injector back to him. He turned to Young. “Keep him here, would you? I doubt we’re going to clear his apartment tonight; we need to bring someone in to sweep for tech. I’ll keep Mitchell updated.”

“Right,” Young said, and hoped a trace of resentment wasn’t audible in his voice.

“Hang on,” Rush said, starting forward. “I’m not staying _here_.”

“Yeah,” David said. “You are. Your cooperation is appreciated, but not one hundred percent necessary. Everett’s still got the tape.”

That made Young’s lips twitch, especially because Rush looked so outraged by it, and he felt friendly towards David for a minute, but David didn’t meet his eyes to share the grin. He just unholstered his gun and turned away, toward the door, without a word.

His departure seemed to leave a hole in the room, larger than his physical body.

Young and Rush looked at one another.

“Th’fuck am I staying here,” Rush said. His accent seemed to have grown stronger since Young had pulled him out of his apartment. He rubbed his wrists resentfully.

“Well,” Young said, “Telford and SG-3 are meeting in your apartment, but if you want to poke around the building, I’m sure you can find some Lucian Alliance lackey ready to give you a ride up to their ship. Mind you, their hospitality’s a little different from mine; I doubt they’re gonna let you crash on their couch or use their kitchen.”

Rush gave him an obscene gesture, but it was British, so Young wasn’t bothered by it. “I can fucking take care of myself,” he said.

Young rolled his eyes. “Right. By the way, you’re welcome for saving you from _almost certain abduction._ ”

A dismissive gesture, this time. Rush was prowling across the living room, towards the balcony door.

“You know what the Lucian Alliance does to people, right? I mean, you get that you would have been tortured? They don’t want you dead; they want you alive. That means they want something from you. And I guarantee you that you do _not_ want them to want something from you.”

“How do you know that I wouldn’t just give them what they wanted?”

Exasperated, Young followed Rush and yanked him back from the balcony. “Because I have faith that you’re a decent human being?”

“Keep your fucking hands off me!” Rush snapped.

“Then don’t act like you’re fixing to make a break for the parking lot!”

Rush shoved at him, and then suddenly they were fighting: not a real fight, but a laughable, wretched mess of flailing at each other that ended pretty quickly on account of how Young was wearing boots, so that when he stomped on the bare instep of Rush’s foot, it was a lot more effective than when Rush had tried it the other way around. Rush let out a clenched sound of pain and backed off, looking wild-eyed and slightly feral.

“Fuck you!” he hissed. “You mad cunt. You drag me out of my _home_ in the middle of the _fucking_ night and tie me up and fire a _gun_ next to my fuckin’ ear, and then you expect me to do whatever the _fuck_ you say? You can get it up yourself!”

Even for Rush, this was extreme. For the first time, it occurred to Young that he didn’t really know what Rush’s background was— that tonight, for all the evidence he had to the contrary, might be the first time that Rush had ever seem somebody fire a gun, a couple of hours after Young had tried to explain to him that he was being hunted by an interstellar space mercenary empire that might kidnap him if he went to the corner store to buy a pack of cigarettes.

“Okay,” he said, holding his hands up. “Just— let’s take it easy.”

“Take it _easy?_ ” Rush said, managing to sound scornful despite looking, more than anything, slightly trapped. “Have all your conversational skills been learnt from fuckin’ country and western songs? Is your mental landscape composed of anything other than pick-up trucks and corn fields?”

“Well, to be fair,” Young said, “I _am_ from Wyoming.”

He’d had an idea that maybe this would calm Rush down a little. People liked to make fun of you if you were from Wyoming, but it was a harmless kind of fun— mostly ribbing about cowboys and sheep-fucking and were there even TVs in Wyoming, or had Young and his brothers gone to barn-raisings for fun.

But Rush’s face twisted. “I don’t give a fuck where you’re from! I don’t know you, and I don’t _want_ t’ know you. You don’t know _me_ , for that matter. A _decent human being_? Why would you think that? Because I fucking cooked you dinner? Because you associate decency with weakness, and you think _I’m_ weak, because I, what— fucking _fainted_ in my apartment, as though you’d know _anything_ about it, with your one-syllable moral summations and your simplistic fuckin’ social graces, fucking _Wyoming_ , and your idiotic sofa, which I didn’t _ask_ to sleep on, by the way, so it’s not like I fucking _owe_ you; if anything, Jackson fucking nonconsensually removed me from my apartment, and I should have _him_ up on charges, the bastard, but you— you don’t know a _thing_ about me, and yet you presume t’ put your fucking hands on my body, because: what? Being in the military gives you a fucking _moral imperative?_ Because you _outrank me?_ ”

Young took advantage of a split-second pause to make a go at interrupting. “Rush—“

“Don’t you say my name in that _condescending_ fucking tone of voice!” Rush was clearly in his stride now, his almost-uninterpretable accent receding as the more familiar hauteur took over. “Being in the military does _not_ give you a moral imperative; even the idea of such a notion is so absurd that I can’t begin to explain it to you, not that that says much, seeing as how your intellect is of such a limited nature that I’d struggle to explain how the sun rises over Cheyenne Mountain every morning, much less the the volume and mass of the moral imperative you _don’t have_ — the extent to which you—“

“Rush,” Young tried again. “I get it. You’re upset.”

“No. _You_ do not get it. _You_ do not get _me._ You do not get that I work on things you couldn’t _begin_ to imagine, projects that would tear apart the fabric of your universe. Moral imperative? You’re making the rules for a fucking board game, you and your mates the Lucian Alliance, while people like _me_ are living out here in the real fucking world, a world that, in case you’re interested, is less fucking guns and more fucking numbers, not that you’d appreciate that fact—“

Young didn’t want to hit him in the face. But at the same time, he kind of thought he needed to get Rush’s attention somehow, before Rush did something stupid, like jumping off the balcony railing or making a grab for Young’s gun. So while Rush was still ranting about numbers being the DNA of reality or something, and morality being a “thin skin of set theory over the formless particles of the void,” Young backed away towards the kitchen and fumbled in the cabinet for a glass. He filled it with cold water at the sink, carried it back to where Rush was now going on about cryptography as the only reliable method of making meaning from the noise of chaos.

“Nothing _human_ has meaning; we’re just transient assemblages of matter that can’t even manage the most rudimentary contemplation of themselves. Why should we consider ourselves any better suited to do more than, if we’re very, _very_ , lucky, point to a pattern in the universe and say, _That._ It’s _that._ _That_ is meaning; it’s what we get from fucking frequency analysis, and anything else is just—

Young threw the glass of water in his face.

Rush stopped talking.

Water dripped onto his white cotton shirt from his hair and face, forming large stains that were heavy and not-quite-white-colored.

“Sorry,” Young said into the silence.

Rush didn’t say anything. Slowly, he raked a hand through his wet hair, and then stared at it as though surprised that it was wet.

“It just—“ Young said. “Seemed like you were kind of going off the rails.”

“Right,” Rush said in an unusually subdued voice. “I see.”

“Sorry.”

“You already said that.”

“I’ll get you a dry shirt,” Young said.

But because he didn’t trust Rush enough to let him out of his sight, he just went to one of the boxes he hadn’t unpacked yet and dug through a couple layers of cargo shorts and towels until he found a t-shirt from the 1998 Bataan Memorial Death March. He’d done it one year when he was stationed out at Holloman, and it had always seemed disrespectful to get rid of the shirt.

He held it out to Rush.

Rush studied the shirt: its aggressive red sword-toting snake-lion. “Bataan Memorial Death March?” he said in a slow tone of disbelief.

“It’s a thing; they hold it at White Sands. A race. Just put the damn shirt on, will you?”

Rush huffed. “I’m certain you possess enough self-awareness to know that something is deeply wrong with you.”

But he stripped his wet shirt off resentfully, hunching his shoulders in a way that automatic, and grabbed the shirt from Young. Young caught a glimpse of him shirtless and saw that he was weedy, pale and barely smudged with hair, not like the men that Young was used to seeing naked. That was weird, and he wondered if Rush found it weirder, being surrounded by men like Young. Then he remembered that he wasn’t one of those men— that when he went back, if he went back, he would be the one in the showers that people stared at without wanting to seem like they were staring, the one whose body you could pick out across a crowded, steamy room.

That made him look away, his lip curling in a kind of uncontrolled, scornful expression, even though he didn’t know who the scorn was directed at. When he looked back, Rush had the t-shirt over his head. It was comically big on him, drooping over his shoulders, and his expression dared Young to say something about it.

Young’s mouth twitched again. He realized suddenly that he didn’t know if he was fighting back a laugh or a noise of exhaustion. He was so tired. He felt like someone had wired hot filaments into his spine and flipped a switch. He wanted to sit down, but he thought it was going to be a painful process.

“Come on, hotshot,” he said, sounding defeated even to himself. “Let’s turn the TV on. It’ll be a while till Mitchell checks in; I’m sure we can find something you’ll watch, and it’ll take your mind off… you know.”

“Doubtful,” Rush said, sounding equally defeated. But he perched on the arm of the couch and watched while Young found the remote and turned the TV on.

A lot of the late-night movies were bad ones, rom-coms or action-adventure bombs from the late nineties that had been offloaded into syndication. Young flipped through, even more tired to find that he recognized them. One of the ten or so nature channels that came with whatever cable package he’d signed up for was broadcasting a marathon of shows about life in the ocean, and so he paused for a while on that, sort of hypnotized by the undersea lighting. The sound was off on the TV, he realized, but that made it more compelling for some reason. Fish drifted across the screen, and sharks, and a spiny, delicate sort of shrimp whose body was entirely translucent.

Neither Young nor Rush spoke for a while. Young watched the shrimp nose its away across the sea bed. It looked like it was made of glass. He didn’t see how it could survive with a body like that. Any stray ocean current would smash it against some rougher and sturdier creature, something optimized for survival. Maybe that was why he found itself rooting for it. Its antennae moved in the dark, questing for information.

“Anthropomorphism,” Rush said in a tired voice.

Young glanced at him. “What?”

“Whatever it is you’re feeling. It’s a fallacy to attribute human emotions to them, however tempting. Their lives aren’t like ours at all, in fact.”

“No? So what are they like?” Young didn’t ask why Rush assumed he knew what Young was feeling.

“I suppose we can’t understand them, and would be better off abandoning the project entirely.”

Onscreen, a large fish pushed forward and swept a cloud of silt and shrimp into its mouth, devouring their little alien lives in one gulp.

Young looked away. “You’re probably right,” he said.


	6. Chapter 6

Rush pressed his fist against the site on his upper arm where he could still feel the sting of the pneumatic injection.

He was staring at the TV screen, where a jellyfish was working its way, dark to light, through layers of sea currents. The air in the apartment itself felt underwater. For some reason he had been finding it difficult to breathe. The darkness outside seemed to press against the windows, hot and dry and rasping, like a dog’s mouth. Was a dog’s mouth dry? He had no animal knowledge. Lacked it, in fact.

He shivered. In Young’s stupid fucking cast-off shirt. He had not wanted it, that shirt, and he would have sat here in his _own_ fucking t-shirt and waited for Telford or Mitchell or whichever colonel to text Young and tell him that the Lucian Alliance was gone and that Rush could go back to his own fucking apartment, which was where he needed to be, in that clean blank space totally enclosed where nothing was allowed to enter, because, see, see, he had left it, and this was what had resulted: sitting on Young’s fucking manliness-coloured leather couch watching fucking Blue Planet or whatever this terrible fucking television programme was, perhaps just the unedited footage of someone sticking a fucking camera in the ocean and turning it on, sea surveillance, the fucking panopticon of the deep, like human beings couldn’t let any particulate mass on the earth go unmonitored, like they had to box it in with their taxonomy and their insipid narration about birth, death, and reproduction, as though cnidarian experiences corresponded to any such things, or as though cnidarians even _had_ experiences, as humans might understand the term, which was far from—

“I can change the channel, if you want,” Young offered, glancing over.

Rush realized he had been digging his fingers into the couch’s leather. He looked, uncomprehending, at his own hand. “No,” he said. “I want—“

He wanted to stop hearing the noise he was hearing, a continuous tone that hovered in the vicinity of E flat. He had been hearing it since Young fired the pistol next to his head. Had it been a pistol? Rush was not familiar with guns, really.

He seemed to be afflicted with a number of questions.

He pressed the base of his palm to his head.

Young was looking at him and it came to him that he had not completed his sentence.

“I’m—“ he said. He did not complete that sentence either. “Are your— are your ears ringing, by any chance?”

He did not like music. No. That was wrong. He did not listen to music. He did not like to listen to music.

When he had arrived in Colorado, David had taken him grocery shopping although Rush had said that he wanted to go alone. What he had wanted was to be alone and that impulse had been a good one because music had been playing over the tannoy in the store, not any music in particular, just music, the arrangement of tones in meaningful patterns, and for a time, perhaps ten minutes, he had tolerated it, but then he had not tolerated it and he had left the store and sat on the kerb smoking cigarette after cigarette until David set four plastic sacks of groceries down on the pavement and joined him there. _You’ll get used to it_ , David had said, and they had pretended he was talking about Colorado, the high clouds and looming mountains, the faceless residents inside the bulky shells of SUVs.

“Yeah,” Young said. His eyebrows were drawn together. “It’s from the gunshot.”

“I see.”

“It’ll stop after a while.”

“Naturally.”

Hesitantly, Young turned off the television. “I know tonight was kind of rough on you,” he said. “Maybe you should get some sleep.”

E flat. E _flat_. But not _completely_.

“I don’t sleep.”

Microtonal. 1225 Hz?

Young sighed and tossed the remote onto the coffee table. “Right. I forgot. You don’t do anything.”

“I need—“ But Rush did not know what he needed.

He tilted his head to one side and held it between his two hands, the thin skin the flesh the bone that was so conductive, resonating hard as though he had been hit, hit at exactly the right point or the right frequency and now he would not stop humming ever, the whole rest of his life as a cosmic tuning fork, which he would not be able to stand, or was he the instrument being tuned and the tuning fork was the fucking pistol, making it Young’s fucking fault, but of course he knew that inevitably the fault was—

He stood abruptly and then he did not know where he was going because he was wearing this fucking ridiculous shirt and had no shoes on and also it was two AM.

“Rush?”

That was Young, who was also standing. Young stood but he did not under _stand_. He would _make_ a stand, probably about Rush sleeping, but Rush could not sleep because it was too _loud_ and oh God it was acquiring overtones.

“How about you sit down, hotshot?”

He should not have started listening to it. He wished he had not started listening to it. He wished he was deaf. He wished he had always been deaf.

But now that he had started listening he could not stop himself listening.

The arch of her finger wavering on the fingerboard.

Creating vibrato.

“I’m fine,” he said.

One of two things was about to happen.

No.

His head was splitting apart.

“I don’t think you are,” Young said.

E flat but not E flat. A badly tuned violin string. What you had to do was get ahold of the peg and—

But the string would _break;_ it was too tightly wound and too fragile; and when it broke then—

“I’m fine,” he said with difficulty, and pried one of his hands loose form his head to make an uncertain gesture. “I’m just— hearing—“

A tone that wanted to move into alignment with what was not yet there.

It was not yet there but it _would be_ , that ghost note, no, _notes_ ; he would hear them, and his mind made ready for their presence, whispered _Turn just a little_ , and he felt it the phantom pressure the fractional shift at the base of the boxwood peg and you have to loosen first before tightening but he was not going to loosen and if he did not loosen then what was going to happen what would happen to him would he—

He would not breathe.

“Breathe,” Young said.

Young was intolerably close to him all of a sudden. A large face looming close and eyes not so dark as he would have supposed and he wanted to flinch but Young had a hold of his face. Fingers digging into the masseter muscles. Breathe. Just breathe.

“No,” Rush said, and tried to shove Young off, because he _could not alter the pressure_ and it was going to break the string that held him to his head, and then what sort of instrument would he be?

A different kind of instrument altogether.

He did not breathe and and he did not breathe and Young held onto him and Young was speaking, but the volume of whatever tone this was that was not E flat increased so that he could not hear what Young said, and it was happening now, it was stretching or he was stretching and soon he would reach—

The upper layers of the ocean? No, that was cnidarians, bioluminescent and brainless and drifting, elegant and many-limbed, and they died out of the water but what if they could become something better, what if they emerged with new appendages, sprouted lungs and _lived?_

“Rush,” he read on Young’s lips, “ _Rush_ ,” but his own lungs were not working perhaps because he no longer had any need of them, and he could _almost hear_ the notes that he would align with after tuning, the spectral vibrations of them there and not there; for thousands of years he had waited for them to arrive.

No. They had waited. No. Something else had waited: to be heard, to hear.

He could sense it in the audience, coughing discreetly. Its taffeta gown’s skirt rustled. It clutched the glossy paper of its program, waiting for the music to begin.

And the music—

The music—

The

m—

* * *

E flat.

A note of resignation.

“That’s all he said, that he was hearing something. Then it was like he hyperventilated and just passed out.”

He _was_ hearing something.

“What were you guys doing before that?”

“Nothing! Just watching TV! I thought he’d actually calmed down; he was pretty upset about the whole, you know, attempted abduction.”

“Yeah. He doesn’t really… calm down, as such.”

They were talking about him. But he was calm. He was calm and he was hearing a tone in the range of E flat and his head hurt.

He had been dreaming of music. He did not like to listen to music.

It was night. He could see the moon through a window. He was lying on a surface that appeared to be linoleum because it was linoleum.

“He was _hearing_ something?”

“I fired my sidearm right next to his head.”

The voices seemed to be coming from the next room. They were talking about him. He recognized the voices.

He turned his head.

David Telford was sitting on the linoleum next to him, leaning against a set of kitchen cabinets. His face was slightly weary and for some reason reassuring. He was playing with a Rubik’s Cube, turning its parts like combination wheels in a lock that he was in no particular hurry to open.

Rush watched him for a moment, feeling fuzzy-headed and heavy and strange. He was in Young’s kitchen, he realized. He had no memory of entering Young’s kitchen, but perhaps he had done. No clear edge delineated the most recent boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness. He was in a half-curled position, and his head was resting in his hands.

David said quietly, without looking up, “I know you’re awake, Nick.”

“Aren’t you—“ Rush’s voice was slow and rusty. “—Supposed to be out hunting space pirates?”

David smiled privately, as though to himself. “The really successful space pirate hunters wait till the space pirates come to them.”

“Yes, well, congratulations. Your plan worked.” Rush pushed himself into a seated position awkwardly. He was still wearing Young’s oversized shirt, he realized. He looked down at the absurdly martial logo emblazoned on it. He did this because didn’t want to look at David though he did not know why. He was still hearing the not-quite E flat and he wished that he were not.

David tipped his head back against the cabinets, setting the puzzle on the floor beside him. He still looked tired, or would have looked tired if looking tired were that something David did. Instead he merely looked as though he were deciding what his next move out to be. It wasn’t an insult to say so, merely an acknowledgement of the man’s more Machiavellian tendencies, which Rush rather appreciated, coming as they did from a place of intellect rather than emotion. Emotion was the black hole to intellect’s matter, a natural phenomenon and a strong one, but all-consuming, a point at which laws ceased to exist.

David didn’t speak for a long moment, but it was a pointed, artful execution of the act of not-speaking, which left no doubt, first, that he had purposefully chosen not to speak because he felt that this was the most succinct way to articulate the point that he was making, and, second, that his attention was— appearances to the contrary— fixed on Rush.

When Rush realized this, he said wearily, “Oh, don’t _you_ start.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Let’s agree to dispense with the delicious and manipulative counterpoint that serves as our usual aperitif. Shall we?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m sure you don’t.”

For the first time, David looked at him— a searching glance that revealed the man’s most unusual aspect: a dark and thoughtful perceptiveness that was intoxicating to have trained upon you. Everything he did he did like a knife to the belly, even his looks. Rush appreciated that too, as a practitioner of the same art.

“How are you doing?” David asked. It was a turn of phrase that Rush had not expected. Not _What’s wrong with you?_ or _How are you feeling?_ but _How are you doing._ Rush preferred that. Action, not affect.

“I’m functioning,” Rush said.

“What happened tonight?”

“I panicked. It’s happened before. Did the spy not tell you?”

“You mean Everett?” David laughed. “If I were going to send someone to spy on you, Nick, it wouldn’t be _him._ And I don’t think for a second you panicked.”

“No?”

“Over this? The Lucian Alliance getting you out of bed in the middle of the night? Oh, wait. I forgot. You don’t have a bed.”

David had seen the inside of his apartment now but it would not matter because he had known that David would understand.

Rush rested his head against the cool wooden base of the kitchen island and closed his eyes. “Civilisation is unconducive to my particular brand of cogitation.”

“This is what I’m talking about. You thrive on chaos, not on niceties. When you freak out, it’s because someone makes you go to a bar or file your goddamn taxes. Not because of shit like this.”

Rush kept his eyes closed, but he could hear David shift across the floor, coming to sit beside him. Warmth increased faintly along his left side.

He hadn’t slept with David. —Yet? It had hung in the air like a faint aroma of potential from the time he had first arrived in Colorado. David had never pressed for it. If he had done perhaps it would have happened. Then again perhaps not. Rush felt too remote for sex, as though he were connected to his body only by a number of very minute threads, like the horsehair strands of a violin bow: prone to snapping.

“Young kidnapped me,” he said. “He fired a gun next to my ear. I was finding it difficult to—“ He swallowed. “Hear clearly.”

“Your ears were ringing,” David said.

It hadn’t been that. “Yes.”

“And are they still?”

Yes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, David!” Rush opened his eyes a crack and glared. “No; I panicked, I passed out, and apparently that was enough to resolve the situation. Happy?”

“All right, all right.” David held up his hands, palms-out: mock-surrender. “Give a guy a break for being concerned that you’re losing your marbles locked up in that shitty apartment. You know if I told Jackson about that place, you’d be under a psych hold.”

Rush did know that. “Yes.”

“But instead I’m letting you work. You could be a little grateful.”

He was tired. That was what he was. To the tune of E flat, but not exactly. “Can we talk about something else, please?”

“Sure, Nick.”

“And don’t patronize me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” A gleam of teeth. David did patronize him, but only in passing, and always with just a hint of a tease. It felt flirtatious. Not like Jackson’s labored overtures of friendship. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I don’t suppose you could open a window?”

“Hell, I don’t even know if the windows in this kind of place open.”

“What the fuck is the point of a _window_ that doesn’t _open?_ ”

Another smile, this one wry. “That’s the American dream.”

Rush shook his head, exhausted. “I thought your people were all about freedom.”

“I see you’ve stumbled onto the national paradox. We _do_ want freedom, but we also want walls without any chinks.”

“You don’t agree. How very unmilitary of you.”

“Oh…” Still smiling, David looked down and smoothed a hand against his uniform trousers. “Maybe I’m interested in more unorthodox solutions. You ever read that Robert Frost poem? _Something there is that doesn’t love a wall._ When I build something, I build something that’ll stay built.”

“I hadn’t figured you for a poetry lover,” Rush said.

“I’m full of surprises.”

Rush shrugged limply.

Really he had wanted the window open because he could not stand the air: the artificial unvarying stream of it. He felt that it was something he couldn’t breathe, that possibly it wasn’t really air. He wanted to stand and go to the balcony— possibly leap off it and be gone forever, slide into the night and take to the hills, where he would not have to be a human any longer, but he knew that animal life would not suit him; and why, he thought, why was there no obverse of animal life?— but he hadn’t the energy to do so.

He was still hearing the tone and he wished that he were not still hearing the tone.

David shifted closer to him. “Tell you what,” he began. “How about you—“

But what he was going to tell Rush remained unuttered, in the realm of the virtual and not the actual, because Jackson rounded the kitchen island at that moment.

“I thought I heard voices,” Jackson said. His eyes moved from David to Rush and back again, watchful and faintly displeased. “Hey, Nick. How are you feeling?”

“Well enough not to be babysat by either the military _or_ the scientific wing of the military-industrial complex,” Rush said.

David laughed.

Jackson pursed his lips. He was wearing a faded sweatshirt over flannel pants and truly abominable sandals, and his hair was disordered; he appeared to have just been got out of bed. Clearly Rush having a panic attack was a national security matter that called for high-level resources to be seconded. This was typical of the way the Americans ran their military.

“David, can I talk to Nick for a sec?” Jackson said.

David said, “Seems like you’re already talking to him.”

There was an air of antagonism between them that Rush did not have the context to understand. It would have been instructive to observe if he had not felt so drained of everything but the echo of the E flat that ran through his head. He would have placed his bets on David, but it was hard to know when to bet on Jackson and when not to. The man had an aura of saintliness that cowed others, that made its own demands.

And, in fact, after a moment David looked away from that saintly aura. “You going to be all right for a minute, Nick?”

“I’m not an invalid,” Rush said irritably, and then he jerked back when David clapped a hand on his shoulder as he stood.

“I know you’re not,” David said. “I would never treat you that way.”

He was looking at Jackson when he said it. Jackson’s mouth went tight at some semantic overtone that Rush could not guess at; his gaze followed Telford as Telford left, something hard in it that had vanished by the time he turned a warm and neutral face to Rush.

“Don’t you start either,” Rush said. He felt twice as exhausted as before. He would rather have had David’s coolly amused and heavy-handed machinations. Jackson’s sympathy, so universally offered, was a grocery store greeting card of a reaction: appropriate for any and all occasions, meaningful for none.

“I like the shirt,” Jackson said, nodding at it.

“Fucking Young.”

“He’s worried about you, you know.”

Rush doubted this very much. “Perhaps he ought to be, since your jackbooted thugs seem helpless against a bunch of outer-space corn rustlers.”

Jackson smiled, as though he found this funny. “It does all sound a little ridiculous, when you put it like that.”

Uninvited and undesired, he entered the kitchen area and took a seat on the linoleum across from Rush. He rested his hands in his lap and waited with a look of gentle inquisition, as though he had asked a question and now expected the answer.

Rush stared at him, refusing to relent.

Several moments passed like this, in silence.

Jackson’s face did not alter. At last, as though the conversation has never paused, he said, “I’m not here to interrogate you, Nick.”

He did not like the way they called him _Nick_. He could not say why, exactly.

“Really?” he said. “So why are you here?”

“I guess I thought you might need a friend."

“You’re not my _friend_.”

Jackson’s mouth curved in a quick, rueful smile. “Well,” he said. “I’m not _not_ your friend.”

“And you’re not needed.”

“Everett seemed to think you were struggling.”

“ _Everett_ is the one who’s fucking struggling,” Rush said, more harshly than he’d meant to. “The man’s a pathetic, lonely, crippled divorcé who couldn’t cook his way out of a tin.”

“He said you were hearing something.”

“He kidnapped me from my apartment and fire a fucking _weapon_ next to my head.”

“He saved your life, you know.”

“Oh, spare me the melodramatics.” Without meaning to, Rush had formed his hands into fists. “I’ve already been subject to an extensive disquisition on the Lucian Alliance, which included the information that they want me alive.”

“Some people might say that’s not better,” Jackson said. His eyes had gone curiously intent. “Are you still hearing it? Whatever you were hearing?”

“No,” Rush said flatly, over the sound of the E flat.

“What were you hearing?”

“My fucking ears were ringing. What do you think?”

“So: a musical note.” Jackson looked away. “Nick—“

“ _Don’t_ ,” Rush said, his breath rushing out of him.

“I just want to— I just want to make a couple of observations, okay?”

“If you’re going to—“ Rush began, but Jackson cut him off.

“Your wife was a violinist,” he said.

“Fuck off,” Rush said. His voice was less steady than he would have liked.

“David told me that you play the piano.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Not anymore.”

“He said that you play well. _Extremely_ well.”

He had played for David in California, though David was no connoisseur of music, or rather had the unacceptable flaw of preferring jazz to classical. He did not know why he had played for David, except that he had known David would listen, and David _had_ listened: intently and with a look of satisfaction, his chin propped on his hand. Turning to him afterwards, Rush had felt unaccountably defensive; vulnerable. Perhaps because David had understood, and perhaps because he’d feared there was something that David might not, could not ever understand.

“No,” he said.

Jackson didn’t say anything for a time. Finally he shifted and said, “And that’s why you panicked.”

“Most people would, given— the circumstances.”

“You mean the music?”

“Why would music cause me to panic?”

“I can— uh, I can think of a few reasons,” Jackson said carefully.

Rush was trying not to listen to the E flat. He ought not to have thought about music again. He was tired, and it leaked into him, making the insides of his bones ache.

“I’d like to be left alone,” he said.

“Why did you panic, Nick?” Jackson asked softly.

Because—

Because he—

Because he had heard—

“I know David’s been pushing you to solve these cyphers,” Jackson said. “Pushing you very hard.”

“Not true.”

“Yes,” Jackson said. He looked away. His mouth twisted. ”True. But that doesn’t mean you can’t— step away from it for a little while.”

“No,” Rush said.

“You could think of it as a vacation.”

“No.”

“You could go to Atlantis. You’re always talking about how you hate America.”

“The Atlantis gate doesn’t contain the ciphers.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jackson said, an edge creeping into his voice. “That’s kind of the whole point.”

Rush looked down at his hands, still forming fists in his lap. He did not know how to explain to Jackson what he could not explain to himself. The 27-trit cyphertext segments that _wanted_ to be solved, the E flat that he was that was not exact and _turning_ towards something or turning _into_ something, yes, that was it, perhaps; the dream of himself as something buried beneath one of the gate’s chevrons; the problem that he alone had seen and that he alone could solve, and was he the solution or the problem? He had not ever stopped to consider the difference. He was not sure, now, if there was one. _That_ was the problem, the metaproblem, he thought.

“Nick,” Jackson said.

He looked up.

“What happened tonight?”

There was no satisfactory answer to that question, so he shook his head in silence.

Jackson sighed, and pushed his glasses up to rub his eyes. “You could stay with me, you know,” he said. “Instead of Everett.”

Rush narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, _stay_ with you.?”

“Your apartment’s not cleared. Probably won’t be till next week.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Uh, let’s see: something about cloaked Lucian Alliance ships in orbit, a credible threat to Earth, limited manpower…” Jackson shrugged. “Plus, in this case, there’s a strong incentive to be sure they’ve eliminated every possible Lucian interference.”

Rush looked at him for a long time, processing. “I don’t know what that means.”

“I know,” Jackson said. He looked away abruptly. “I know you don’t.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

Jackson shook his head.

“Why are you here?” Rush asked suddenly, for the second time. “Why is David here?”

“I’m here because I want to make sure you’re safe,” Jackson said. He didn’t answer the second question.

“Two of the most prominent members of your ridiculous little organization. Because you _care_ about me?” He shook his head derisively. “Why? The cyphers?”

“No,” Jackson said, but he didn’t say anything more than that. He pressed his lips together tightly.

There was a silence.

“You don’t have to solve them,” Jackson said. His voice was very quiet.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rush said. His nails bit into the palms of his hands.

“I do. I _do_. Just— stop listening to David, would you?”

“I _like_ David.”

“Yeah. I know you do. But I think—“ Jackson hesitated. “I think he’s very focused on something that’s very dangerous to you, Nick.”

“But you won’t tell me what it is,” Rush said flatly.

“I’m trying to get you clearance.”

“How can I not have _clearance?_ It’s fucking _about_ me!”

“I’m trying,” Jackson said again.

Rush turned his head to the side, feeling angry in a way that called for action, and unwilling to take it out on Jackson, who was only an idiot, smearing his ubiquitous sentiment over the world like thin margarine on bread. “And you’re leaving me with _Young?_ What’s he supposed to do next time the Lucian Alliance break my door down? Fall on them? Or, no— maybe he could bore them with stories about his ex-wife.”

Jackson gave him a look that communicated disappointment. It was a very schoolmarmish sort of look. “He seemed to do all right tonight,” he said mildly. “In spite of your best efforts.”

“Yes, well, maybe if he had—“

“He nearly died,” Jackson said. “You could be nicer. He’s had a difficult year.”

“So now I’m meant to babysit _him?_ Or perhaps you envisioned a sort of mutual babysitting situation.”

Jackson laughed. “You are many things,” he said, standing as he said it. “Most of them remarkable. But my first choice as a babysitter is not one of them.”

Rush accepted the hand Jackson offered and and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. He tried to hide the slight shakiness in his legs, but suspected Jackson saw it. “I’m certain I would be an exemplary babysitter,” he said, to distract from it.

“ _That_ ,” Young said from the direction of the sofa, “is the wildest thing I’ve heard come out of your mouth so far, hotshot, which is saying something.”

Young was leaning against the far wall, by the balcony doors, his arms crossed and a set look of badly-concealed pain on his face. He was adamantly not looking at David, who had his back to Young and was inspecting an almost-empty bookshelf on the other side of the room. The tension in the room could have supported the average circus performer, but it source was not immediately apparent to Rush.

“You,” Rush said, levelling a finger at Young, “know very fucking little about me.”

“At least you’re on your feet again, I guess,” Young said.

“Fuck off.”

Young gave Jackson a weary look. “You’re really leaving him with me?”

“I offered—“ Jackson started, just as David turned away from the bookcase and said, “I’m happy for him to stay at my place.”

For some reason this caused the room’s tension to multiply, or possibly to undergo exponentiation. Jackson was regarding David with an expression of unreadable hostility; David, on the other hand, had affected a look of relaxation. He was holding a paperback book in one hand, _The Brothers Karamazov,_ which seemed like an unlikely candidate for Young’s library.

And, indeed, David said, “Dostoevsky, Everett? Really? Doesn’t seem like it’s your speed. You mind if I borrow this?”

Young’s brow furrowed. He seemed to be attempting to ascertain David’s strategy, which was a wise impulse, but failing to do so, which Rush could have predicted. “No,” he said, sounding reluctant. “Go ahead.”

“I appreciate it,” David said. He turned the book over and inspected the cover, which showed a snow-covered wood through which a path receded towards the horizon. There was a single small dark figure very far down the path. “I’ve been meaning to catch up with the classics.”

The radio at his hip crackled. He raised it to answer. “Yeah, this is Telford.”

One of the military’s innumerable identical voices said, “Sir, we’ve done all we can here, and we’re about ready to leave the geeks to it.”

“I think you mean our valuable tech companions,” David corrected smoothly.

There was a hesitation. “Yes, sir,” the man the other end of the line said. “That’s what I meant.”

“I’ll be down in a second. Tell Reynolds we’re going to need to zero-op an al’kesh.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Telford out."

Rush had been looking at Young. Jackson he did not need to look at because he found Jackson transparent to his anatomization; perhaps he did not know the cause of Jackson’s quarrel with David, but he could predict the broad strokes of the position Jackson was likely to take. David was more subtle, but he too could be predicted, if only to play the long game. Young, Rush thought, was quite probably too stupid to be playing any sort of game at all, which had a certain charm to it, even if the man expressed himself through abductions.

And perhaps Rush was tired of games. Tired of games, and of E flat.

“I’ll stay with Young,” he said.

David and Jackson stared at him with twin taken-aback expressions. Young, caught in the act of the wince he had been concealing, looked curious rather than surprised.

“If I’m to be imprisoned _somewhere_ ,” Rush amended. “Which I maintain, incidentally, is offensive, and detrimental to my work. I’ll need my laptop, or _a_ laptop capable of running sCrypt. Young’s will do; I doubt he’s literate enough to use it with any frequency.”

Young smoothed a hand over his face. He appeared to be hiding either offense or amusement. “Pretty sure my laptop’s classified.”

“Well, I won’t tell General… whatever-that-general’s-name-is if you don’t.”

“I’m sure we can get you a computer,” Jackson cut in firmly. “ _Without_ necessitating any potentially treasonous subterfuge.”

“Oh, I think Nick enjoys a little bit of subterfuge now and then,” David said. “Don’t you, Nick?”

He was looking at Rush from under his lashes slightly, with an air that invited Rush to a conspiracy. It was the same affect he’d shown when he’d visited Rush in San Francisco and told him for the first time about the gate. _I shouldn’t tell you this_ , he’d said, but then he had done: a gift that had to be reciprocated, a favor that Rush couldn’t now not return at a time and date of David’s naming. Perhaps this was the same, the offer that didn’t conceal but would, rather, double as extortion. Everything was transactional with David; that was what made him easy to work with. It was a paradigm that Rush knew well.

Rush met his eyes. He said, “Now and then.”

* * *

When David and Jackson had gone, Young shut the door and leant against it, tight-faced and somewhat hunched-over. He wasn’t wearing his absurd medical brace, Rush noted; presumably there hadn’t been time to put it on when the Lucian Alliance attacked, or invaded, or whatever the technical term was for the military tactic of arriving to suburban Colorado in the dead of night aboard a cloaked alien ship. Young had not put the brace on, but he had shot a man over Rush’s right shoulder. Rush had elbowed him in the stomach. Young had stepped on his foot. Later, Young had got hold of his jaw and said his name. _Rush_. Not _Nick_ , the way that David and Jackson said it.

Young had not mentioned at any point that he was in pain.

“You’re staring at me,” Young said, without opening the eyes that he had let drift closed. “I can tell, you know. Us colonels get secret training.”

“Would you care for a glass of water?” Rush asked. “I won’t throw it in your face.”

Young fixed him with a look of wan astonishment. “I wouldn’t say no.”

So Rush fetched him a glass of cold water, and watched in silence as Young drank all of it.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, anyway?” Rush asked, because he had not asked, which seemed an oversight on the tactical if no other level.

Young looked into the empty glass, as though he might find the answer to the query among the last dregs of water. “Oh,” he said. “You know how it is. Sometimes you just get in the way of something bigger than you are.”

It was a ludicrous fucking response and oddly abstract, coming from such a relentlessly physical man. Rush found it unsatisfying but did not know how to enquire further.

“Anyway,” Young said, “what the fuck is wrong with _you?_ Why’d you pass out in my kitchen?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Rush said. “I’m fine.”

“Right. You’re fine. You’re obviously fine.”

“Well,” Rush said. “You know how it is. Sometimes you just get in the way of something bigger than you are.”

He had meant to put a sarcastic twist to the words, to highlight the insufficiency that Young _must_ be aware of. He was not entirely sure why this attempt failed, except that he was exceedingly tired, and therefore not capable of his usual tonal sophistication. Instead he sounded both sincere and exhausted, which appalled him. He stood abruptly from where he had allowed himself to sink onto the arm of the couch.

“I object to being made your fucking captive,” he informed Young, hoping to achieve a more satisfactory dynamic between them. “And I intend to protest strenuously, starting first thing in the morning.”

“Fair enough,” Young said. “Thanks for the advance notice. You still hearing your— you know— thing?” He motioned vaguely by his head.

E flat, but not exactly. Not precisely.

Like a bell that had been rung a long time ago. The sound waves had traveled a long distance to reach him, but were not dispersing.

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for—

“Yes,” Rush said.


	7. Chapter 7

Young awoke to the sun squinting at him through the wooden slats over his bedroom window.

Half-awake, he squinted back at it.

His overall impression was of being hungover, even though he wasn’t, and the bones of his lower back and pelvis felt like someone had taken them out, hammered at them for a while, and stuck them back in. The muscles around them were knotted into hard bands. He foresaw a struggle trying to get up. There was a bottle of Flexeril on the nightstand for exactly this kind of situation, but he hadn’t taken any for— more than a week, now, maybe, and he didn’t want to start again. The haze of the hospital still felt too close, a time when every day had been divided into increments of enforced physical torment and a release that came at the expense of feeling like he had a real body.

The painkillers had given him nightmares, too, nightmares that seemed so real they were confusing, in which he was back on Sest Bet, in which David was Emily, and Emily was dressed like a Lucian Alliance warlord, with black leather high-heeled boots and a holster at her hip, or in which he was dragging David up a caldera that seemed to grow higher as they climbed it, dark smoke spewing from beyond the ridge and pebbles clattering down in fistfuls like swarms of sharp insects. In the dreams he kept apologizing to David, saying, _I’m sorry, I’m so sorry; I’m sorry it had to be this way; I didn’t know it would be you._

But he wasn’t going to get up without the pills, so he fumbled for them and downed a couple without water. Afterwards he lay there waiting for them to kick in.

The door to his bedroom was open and he could hear someone typing in the living room.

Rush. Rush was typing.

At least he hadn’t fled it in the night. Presumably Telford had people watching the building who would have stopped that from happening.

Telford. David.

Young shut his eyes.

Christ.

His instinct upon thinking about David in his crisply-pressed uniform, neutral-faced and unreadable, saying, _What kind of conversation would you like to have?_ was to curl up on his too-new, too-stiff, Target-brand sheets and pull the covers over his head.

But he was a soldier, goddamnit, not a girl who’d been dumped by her senior prom date, and so what he did instead was shut his eyes, and count to ten, and shout, “Rush! You better not be using my computer!”

There was no response.

Young raised his head, wincing slightly. “Rush!”

“Fuck off!” came the mature and sophisticated response he had already learned to expect from Rush.

Young sighed and spent a long moment looking at the ceiling. He found it hard to move in the mornings a lot these days, even when he wasn’t feeling the effects of overexertion. There was a heaviness in his body that hadn’t been there before, a lethargy or maybe a kind of inertia. Was that what inertia was? It was like he was always waking up from a hard blow to the head that had stunned him. He didn’t know why, exactly. Everyone kept telling him that he was bound to be depressed, but he wasn’t, not really. When he’d gone to see his mandated therapist, all he could say to her was, _No one died, but I feel like someone did._ She’d said, gently and precisely, _Maybe_ you _died, Everett. A version of you that was very important._ That wasn’t what it felt like, but he couldn’t make her understand. He couldn’t make _himself_ understand.

Still. He couldn’t let Rush run around accessing classified information. So he heaved himself upwards with a grimace and began the slow task of becoming bipedal, leaning on the nightstand for support. He was wearing a t-shirt, at least, not just a pair of boxer shorts, so he didn’t have to worry about managing to put clothes on yet; he could just stagger out of the bedroom, one hand wrestling his hair into some kind of order, and glare suspiciously in Rush’s direction.

Rush— still wearing Young’s Bataan Memorial Death March t-shirt, and giving no sign of having slept— was sitting at the kitchen island, hunched over whatever computer he’d acquired, wearing his slightly crooked glasses and a sour look. “I believe I told you to fuck off,” he said, without so much as glancing in Young’s direction.

“Where’d you get the computer from?” Upon close inspection, it wasn’t Young’s, and it was running a program that Young had never seen, something with a complicated set of windows that seemed to be half in the weird little blocky lines of Ancient.

“David sent someone by with it this morning. You didn’t wake up.”

“Really?” Young frowned and scratched his head. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Half eleven,” Rush said. “I am unsurprised that you feel mornings to be beneath your attention.”

“I think you can give me a break, since I was up till all hours saving your ass.” Turning to the counter, Young found a half-pot of coffee waiting in the coffeemaker, still hot. He grabbed a mug from the cabinet. “Thanks for making coffee, though.”

“That’s for me, not for you,” Rush said. He still hadn’t looked up from the computer. “I require regular caffeine intake for optimal function.”

“Yeah, well: my coffeemaker, my coffee.” Young took a sip.

“I believe it’s the perquisite of hostages to be provisioned by their jailers.”

Young rolled his eyes. “I’m not your jailer, Rush.”

“Wonderful,” Rush said, and stood in one smooth movement. “So I can leave, then.”

Young wished he’d woken up early enough to get a couple of cups of coffee in him before dealing with Rush, or that he’d at least waited for the muscle relaxants to kick in. “If you want to risk the Lucian Alliance kidnapping you and torturing you till you spill the beans on whatever you’re working on, then sure, yeah.”

Rush’s fists clenched. He looked away. His jaw worked. Young figured he was probably about to be subjected either to a rant about how important Rush’s work was or another round of extremely specific and targeted personal abuse, which he thought he might be starting to build up a tolerance to, but which he felt too exhausted and beat-down to take.

“Look—“ Young began, hoping to derail him.

He was interrupted, however, by a knock at the door— something that caught Rush’s attention and changed his look from one of growing fury to apparent satisfaction.

“Ah,” Rush said. “Excellent timing.”

“What do you mean, _excellent timing?_ ” Young asked suspiciously.

He followed Rush to the door, still clutching his coffee mug, and wondering what else Rush had browbeat David into sending over. Hopefully, at the very least, some shoes.

But the person standing in the doorway when Rush opened it wasn’t some sergeant from the Mountain. It was a confused-looking UPS driver toting an enormous cardboard box.

“Uh,hi,” the UPS driver said uncertainly. “The… armed guards outside who made me go through seven separate screenings said this was the right address?”

“Yes, yes,” Rush said impatiently. “Please place the box in the kitchen and indicate what sort of ineffectual security measure I’m required to fulfill.”

The UPS guy heaved the box over the threshold and headed for the kitchen. “I think I could have taken this thing on an _airplane_ without anyone caring so much about what was inside it,” he said, still sounding doubtful. “Or about what was inside _me._ I’m pretty sure they gave me some kind of _CT scan_.”

“Mechanically infeasible,” Rush informed him, and, when the guy had put the box down, signed his name on the proffered electronic trackpad. “As you would know if you had even the most basic awareness of medical technology. Please leave.”

Young had to usher the guy out of the apartment. “Sorry,” he said, trying to project a level of friendliness that would avert any potential reports to the local news. “Thanks for being patient with… all of this.”

When he’d closed the door, he turned and stared at Rush, who was very calmly using a kitchen knife, which Young was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to use on plastic tape, to cut into the plastic tape covering the box.

“What the hell?” he said finally.

“Your knives are shit anyway,” Rush said, making a short emphatic gesture with the one he was holding. “I’ve ordered you new ones.”

“And that’s what’s in the box?”

“No; I couldn’t get same-day delivery on the knives. I believe this is either the sous vide immersion circulator or the vacuum evaporator system.”

Young shut his eyes. He felt a headache coming on. “Rush. _What_ the _fuck_?”

Rush peered inside the box. “It _is_ the vacuum evaporator system.” He straightened, looking pleased. “Your ludicrously overfunded organization opted to issue me a credit card some time ago, for any expenses I might encounter. I had not, heretofore, found reason to use it. However, being held hostage is turning out to be an unexpectedly expensive experience.”

“Come on. You’ve been a hostage for—“ Young checked his watch. “ _Eight hours._ You’re not even a _hostage_ ; you’re in, like, protective custody.”

“Yes, well, I’m finding it extremely stressful so far.” Rush didn’t even bother to pretend like he believed what he was saying. He was busy unpacking the piece of machinery that the box contained, which was large, sleek, matte silver, and looked like it belonged in a lab.

Young eyed it skeptically. “I thought you were a mathematician. What the hell do you need science stuff for?”

“It isn’t ‘science stuff,’” Rush said, setting the… item… on the kitchen counter. “Or rather, it is _culinary_ science stuff. It is a tool designed for the preparation and, one might say, perfection of the culinary arts. It allows for the distillation and evaporation of liquids, allowing one to create not only highly delicate reductions, but also aromatics for savory cocktails and smoke infusions.”

Young stared. “You bought this thing to _cook with?_ ”

“Mm.” Rush was already attaching little pipes and hoses. “Don’t worry; I took the liberty of ordering you some more sophisticated groceries as well; they should arrive by this afternoon.”

“I liked the groceries I _had_ ,” Young said, which was a lie, and a pretty bold-faced one.

Rush threw him a scathing look. “No one likes turkey bacon and shelf-stable parmesan cheese, _or_ Kraft singles. I also took the liberty of disposing of your so-called beer, and will be replacing it with a selection of moderately-priced wines, lambic, and hefeweizen.”

Young was still coming to terms with the fact that Rush had decided to order him groceries. Maybe he _had_ been kind of attached to the old ones, he thought— not because he’d liked them, but because they’d been dully and completely, stolidly consistent with the role in life he was trying to get himself accustomed to. _This is who you are now_ , they’d said. _A man who limps home from your sad desk job and microwaves a pre-cooked hamburger patty, sticks it on a bun with a slice of cheese, downs a double scotch, and calls it a night._ And he’d been ready for that, or some part of him had, the deeply bruised part he couldn’t explain or account for. His immediate response to Rush thwarting him in this downward spiral was a kind of sour indignation.

But: “You got rid of my _beer?_ ” was all he said.

“I’ll need to borrow another shirt,” Rush said. “Presuming you believe that the Lucian Alliance has cunningly implanted poison barbs and/or tracking devices inside all of my boxes of clothing.”

Young frowned. “Your _boxes_ of clothing?”

Rush was abruptly very busy with his vacuum-whatever thingamabob. “Preferably the least absurd of your shirts,” he said, determinedly not looking up. “Note that I’m opting not to make the assumption that you actually possess an item of clothing that could be described as wholly _non_ -absurd.”

“Can’t you just order a whole new wardrobe online?” Young said, slightly peeved.

“As though I would spend even the military’s money on anything I could get delivered to Colorado Springs.”

“Right,” Young said, rolling his eyes. “Of course.” But he still couldn’t get over the _boxes of clothing._ “Rush,” he said, trying to figure out a way to phrase the question— but he was interrupted by the doorbell.

“I’m so hoping that’s the immersion blender and the edible film sealer,” Rush said with a malicious brightness.

Young rubbed one eye, thinking longingly of the bottle of muscle relaxants in his bedroom.

* * *

By the time late afternoon rolled around, Young had involuntarily acquired what was probably several thousand dollars’ worth of specialty cookware, including a whipping siphon, some kind of old-timey balancing coffee maker, a spherification kit, and a couscoussier. His refrigerator was full of vegetables he didn’t recognize, and his cabinets with spices he’d never heard of. He had been served, for lunch, a roasted cauliflower steak with fried basil and pickled lemon aioli, along with something called salsify purée. It had been… fine, he guessed, though Rush hadn’t actually seemed interested in what he thought about it. He didn’t think Rush was cooking for him. Or for himself, really; he’d been on his computer while he was eating, using one hand to type with and the other to shove chunks of cauliflower in his mouth with a fork.

Rush was still on the computer now, running the same unfamiliar program. It made Young restless just to watch him sitting there, his back a narrow, motionless hunch.

“What are you doing, anyway?” Young asked finally. He himself had settled on the sofa, stretched out in a way that managed to be mostly painless, and had the TV running in the background on mute.

Rush very slowly raised his eyes from the computer screen. His eyebrows were drawn together in an expression of profound confusion. He didn’t even speak, just spent a solid minute looking at Young that way.

“I mean,” Young said, conscious of the real possibility that Rush was about to make him feel dumb, or throw something at him, “I get that you solve codes. Like, generally. I know that you’re working on the codes in the stargate that are supposed to let us dial the nine-chevron address.”

“Yes,” Rush said. “That’s what I’m doing.”

“But what are you doing right now?”

And there was the _look:_ Rush thinking that he was an idiot. “That.”

“Yeah, but—“

“Tell me, Colonel,” Rush interrupted. “Is your life really so devoid of both joy and interest that you’re reduced to inquiring after the mathematical specifications of extraterrestrial cryptanalysis, something that you will almost certainly prove incapable of understanding?”

Young thought about it for a half-second. “Yes,” he said honestly. If he’d thought about it for more than a half-second, maybe he wouldn’t have said it.

Rush narrowed his eyes. He looked at Young for a long time. “Well,” he said at last, “A piece of cryptanalytic software I designed— which also happens to be the international standard in cryptanalytic software; not, you understand, that I like to brag— is currently attempting to locate previously undetected patterns in the eighth segment of the stargate’s ciphertext. Meanwhile, I am working to determine if one possible plaintext interpretation of that segment might represent a sequence of numbers that correspond to the resonance frequencies of DHD crystals in their default, natively configured state, or rather, if it does, what might be the significance of such a sequence.”

Young winced. “Yeah. I understood none of that.”

Rush looked like he was about to make a cutting remark, but then, inexplicably, didn’t. Possibly he’d remembered that he was staying in Young’s apartment, and was, in fact, wearing another one of Young’s shirts: this one a plain white v-neck undershirt that seemed inoffensive enough, apart from being too big in the shoulders. “Unless I’m incorrect, the eighth segment of ciphertext decrypts to a set of numbers that represent specific DHD crystals. The numbers are arranged in an order that I am attempting to understand. I believe it may represent the opening of a solution to a Hamiltonian cycle problem—“

“A what?”

Rush made a noise of frustration. “A problem wherein one attempts to determine a route that visits each—let’s call it a _landmark_ in a system once and only once, before returning to the place whence one began.”

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard someone use the word _whence_ ,” Young said reflectively, letting his head tip back against the arm of the sofa. “Like, in my whole life, maybe.”

He could feel Rush glaring at him. “ _Significantly_ ,” Rush said, “if I am correct, and the plaintext of this segment represents an invitation to complete the Hamiltonian cycle, then I suspect that obtaining the chevron data that was not contained in the plaintext itself may require materially implementing the solution.”

“What does that mean?”

Young lifted his head just in time to see Rush’s face go distant, reflective. “I believe,” Rush said, “that in order to actually obtain the eighth chevron, I would need to interact with a DHD, which would mean going offworld, sometime quite soon, as no natively-configured DHD currently exists on Earth.”

“Yeah, right,” Young said, letting his head fall back again. “Good try at getting out of your little hostage crisis. They’ll probably just send Carter to the alpha site or something, with a copy of your work.”

“Any such implementation would carry the risk of destroying the DHD, as I’m certain that a subroutine of some sort is intended to be triggered, and I don’t know _what_ sort of subroutine.”

“All right, so _not_ the alpha site. It’s still not gonna be you that goes.”

“I think—“ Rush said, with a rare, vague note of uncertainty to his voice. “I think that it might _have_ to be me.”

There was something about that tone Young found disturbing. He sat up, ignoring his lower back’s protest, and looked at Rush. “What does _that_ mean?” he asked, hearing the trepidation in his voice. “Rush, what does that mean?”

Rush was staring unseeing at his computer screen, his head tilted slightly, as though he were listening to something that Young couldn’t hear.

“Rush,” Young said again.

Rush startled. “Yes,” he said. He spared Young a nervous, distracted frown before hunching defensively over his laptop. “Obviously it would have to be me,” he said, striving for and almost achieving his ordinary level of disdain. “I would have to troubleshoot the program.”

Young said slowly, “Right.”

He watched as Rush went back to working. On the television screen, barely visible to his left, a bomb was going off in the desert, silent, and white dust was falling from the sky onto yucca plants and tortoises and rabbits. It was a reenactment, Young thought, because he thought it was supposed to be the Trinity test, and there hadn’t been any video of it, definitely not of the fallout. They hadn’t even really known about fallout back then. He’d thought about it a lot when he’d been stationed at Holloman; he’d thought about how it was down under the concrete of the roads, in the dirt that blew up out of the west on stormy days, and in the big chamisas with their yellow flowers that sometimes turned out to be radioactive, white-hot radioactive, even though you couldn’t see it in the flowers or the stems. David, who was from New Mexico, but not that far south, had laughed at him for caring about it. He’d said, _Hell, we just assume everything’s radioactive around here. We got a baseball team up in Albuquerque called the fucking Isotopes!_ Young had said, _Seems kind of morbid._ David had grinned at him, so young then, all white teeth and black hair. _Better than pretending you’re the one person who’s not going to get poisoned,_ he’d said to Young, _the one person who’s going to make it out of this with clean hands._

The bomb exploded again on the screen, in slow motion, weirdly beautiful. It made Young feel that heaviness again, the one that seemed to weigh down his bones. He watched the silent explosion for a second longer before abruptly turning the TV off.

“Rush,” he said without moving.

Rush made a sound halfway between a sigh and a huff. ‘What?”

“Are you still hearing that sound?”

There was a short pause. “Why?” Rush asked.

“Just— you looked like you were hearing something, a second ago.”

Another pause. Rush’s fingers stopped clicking over the keyboard. “No,” Rush said. “Of course I’m not.”

“Right,” Young said. “Of course you’re not.”

He hadn’t shifted on the couch. He could see the faintest reflection of Rush on the now-blank TV screen, raking his hair back from his face in a kind of nervous tic. It was a ghost-image of Rush, not clear enough for Young to make out his expression. Young could have pushed himself up and turned, tried to see that expression, but would that have told him anything useful? He didn’t really know Rush. Not well enough to know when Rush was lying. All he knew about Rush was that he was an asshole with an anxiety disorder and odd taste in food.

Still, he watched the ghost-Rush for a while as Rush went back to typing. It was kind of restful to have someone else in the room, just working. He hadn’t ever had that with Emily. He hadn’t known to act around her, when they’d moved in together and she was suddenly _there_ , being a person like any other person, rather than a girl on whom he was expected to lavish a specific type of attention. He’d been caught in a kind of alarm for days, frozen between bestowing that same attention and acting like he would’ve acted otherwise, without her. It was exhausting. Maybe he hadn’t actually ever gotten over it.

He’d wanted to be back in the barracks, but you couldn’t have that with women. Or he hadn’t figured out how to, anyway, _yet_ , he thought, _yet_. And he refused to take that thought further, when he was doped up on pills and he’d been thinking of David, so instead he said, “I’ll talk to Landry about the offworld thing when I get a chance.”

Rush stopped typing again. He sounding cautious when he said, “I’d appreciate it.”

“I can’t promise anything, especially since you’d need ship-based support so you don’t strand yourself halfway across the galaxy when you break your DHD.”

“I didn’t say I _would_ break it,” Rush said, sounding offended. “I said that there was a _risk_ it might be destroyed.”

“Uh-huh. Nice use of the passive voice there.”

“I’m astounded that you know what the passive voice is.”

“I’m not an idiot just because I’ve never eaten a salsify before,” Young said, surprised to find himself grinning. “Speaking of, what’s for dinner?”

“Speaking of _which,_ I think you mean. I was thinking of constructing an avocado and orange soup with passionfruit caviar and goat’s cheese. Possibly with a pumpkin sorbet, though I was disappointed to find myself unable to obtain a whole pumpkin. I came to America under the impression that it was full of pumpkins.”

“Well, that all sounds weird,” Young said, “but: if you’re into it, okay.”

“You’ll forgive me if I decline to accept the culinary descriptions of someone who was raised, no doubt, on a diet of white factory bread, iceberg lettuce, and processed meat. The influence on the American diet of your nation’s fanatical love of the technological is intensely regrettable. Not to mention the dubiously democratic instinct that sees it insist on exalting the lowest common denominator; why that should be considered an admirable trait I’m sure I don’t—“

Rush continued on like that for a while, his voice becoming a drone in the background.

Young, who hadn’t realized how tired he was, found himself on the brink of sleep— and then, strangely relaxed, finally crossed it. He dreamed that he was tending pumpkins, fields of pumpkins on long vines that stretched out to the horizon, the pumpkins large and fragile and hollow, possibly made of glass— something that would shatter if you dropped it, into lots of small sharp pieces. He knelt down and placed his hand on one of the pumpkins. He was aware of it ripening. He knew, in the dream, that it contained something precious, something that he was going to harvest one day, but not yet.


	8. Chapter 8

It was morning, and Rush was sitting on Young’s couch, which irritated him immensely— less the state of being-sat-on-a-couch, although that too was a situation he would have liked to have avoided, something that kindled uncomfortable patterns of limbically ingrained behavior ( _Nick has no one in your whole life ever taught you how to sit on a sofa? Nick you have to at least pretend to be enjoying yourself. Nick, you spent the whole party scribbling little notes on a napkin; Manushka thinks you hate him now; Nick are you listening to me? Nick, no one in your whole life, ever?)_ than the actual couch in question, the making of which had occasioned the deaths of so many sad bovines. It looked like it belonged in a hunting lodge, or perhaps in the basement lair that so many males of the American variety seemed to require. It was a couch that played pool. It was a couch that shot the shit. It was a couch that cared deeply about football, and voluntarily consumed potato skins. He did not like the couch, and he did not like the shirt he was wearing, which declared the wearer to “Love Motor Boatin’ in the Grand Tetons.”

Rush did not love motor boatin’ in the Grand Tetons. Rush disapproved of the use, general and specific, of the apostrophe to replace a final coronal nasal, loathed travelling by water, and had no particular notion of where the Grand Tetons might be. Nor did he wish to be informed of their location, as he assumed that Young did, in fact, love motor boatin’ there, and that as such it was likely to contain a number of items from the set of things he despised, amongst that set being motor boats, people who used apostrophes to replace final coronal nasals, and Young.

He glared at the computer screen, where he was using Python to explore Hamiltonian cycles for the seventy-four DHD crystals. Problematically, his solutions were all entirely theoretical, given his lack of access to a natively configured DHD. This too was contributing to his sense of ambient irritation— the whole room, and possibly the state of Colorado, conspiring to irritate him, as it were.

It was morning and he did not like mornings.

It was the second day he had spent imprisoned in Young’s flat.

Young was sitting next to him on the couch.

Some form of wildlife documentary was playing on the television screen.

Young was watching the TV on mute.

Young was tapping a pen against the arm of the couch, ignoring the paperwork in his lap.

Rush was concatenating all of the factors that were currently irritating to him.

“What on earth is the point,” he burst out with finally, unable to ignore Young’s arrhythmic tapping any longer, “of watching a television programme you’re _not even watching?_ ”

Young frowned at him. “I am watching it.”

“You haven’t even got the sound on!”

“It’s a nature show; I don’t need the sound to watch it. I turned on the subtitles.”

“A typically vulgar perspective.”

“All right; I’ll turn the sound on. I thought it would bother you.” Young reached for the remote, and hit a single button.

The room was abruptly filled with a bland world-music-style soundtrack, orchestrations overscored with what Rush tentatively labeled Tibetan singing bowls and erhu. He stared at the screen, no longer noting the changing gradations of sea water or the dark fish-shaped shadows. His hands tightened around his computer. “I don’t want the sound on,” he said, aware that his voice had emerged taut and mechanical-sounding.

Young made a markedly frustrated noise, and didn’t move towards the remote. “Then what the hell _do_ you want?”

“Just— turn it off,” Rush said.

He resisted the urge to stand up and stalk across the room and possibly leave the apartment, because that would be highly nonstandard behavior, and he was striving to curtail his nonstandard behavior so as to avoid undue attention, and there were soldiers stationed at various points around the building, so he would not get far, and he was wearing this ridiculous shirt, which would give anyone he encountered the impression that he loved motor boatin’ in the Grand Tetons, so he could not leave the apartment, but for a moment he considered it, and—

“Rush,” Young said, and he was looking at Rush strangely, as though perhaps he had said something that Rush had been unable to perceive over the oddly violin-like sound of the erhu. A muted violin on an old recording, broadcasting from very far away. So far away that you thought you’d never hear it again, and then you did, and you weren’t prepared for it, and you—

“I don’t like music,” Rush said.

He was breathing too fast.

Young muted the sound on the television. He was still looking at Rush with that stupid brows-drawn-together expression, as though he didn’t know that he was an element in the set of things that Rush despised, or didn’t know how to properly occupy the space he’d been allotted. It was intolerable, really, his ignorance; it was like a boot on Rush’s chest when he was already not breathing, and he—

He pried his hands off of the sides of his computer and he—

He snapped his computer shut and shoved himself off the couch.

“Rush,” Young said again.

“Fuck off,” Rush snapped.

He put his computer on the kitchen island and put his elbows on the kitchen island and allowed his head to rest in his hands. He wanted to be in a room alone with the first seven chevrons and the cyphers. He wanted to be in a room with no furniture and blank white walls. He wanted to not be in a room but to be nowhere and to be no one and nothing except possibly the echo of an E flat that touched him with tentative fingers, not quite gone from his hearing and curious as to whether it could be him again, and he wanted that, he did, but it was faint now, and he could not manage to _hear_ it, not completely, and he could not—

Young touched his shoulder and he started violently, sending a nearby glass of water flying.

Too late he reached for the glass and could not stop its parabola’s abrupt and violent end. Shards of of it spat across the hardwood floor in an irregular starburst shape.

“Jesus!” Young said.

Rush hunched his shoulders and bit down on the apology his mouth wanted to utter. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I told you: I don’t like music.”

“…Right,” Young said slowly, after a long pause. “Got it. No music.”

Rush opened his laptop and stared determinedly at its screen.

Eventually, behind him, Young slowly began to limp across the room to fetch a dustpan, then, at the same agonizingly protracted tempo, limped back. There was a silence as, presumably, his 60-MHz-processor brain attempted to calculate a method that he could use to crouch down and clean up the broken glass shards.

The silence lasted.

Rush created a new recursive utility function.

He considered the practicality of running a current through the DHD’s seventy-four individual crystals.

Young braced himself against the wall with one hand.

“Oh, _fuck off_ ,” Rush said viciously.

In one short, sharp movement, he pushed himself back from the island and seized the dustpan from Young’s unresisting hand. “Why aren’t you in hospital, anyway; you’re clearly incapable of caring for yourself. What, did the nurses tire of your womanizing ways and turf you out on the street?”

He was fishing bits of glass from the puddle of spilt water, so he was unable to see the expression that accompanied the odd sound that Young made, a painful, muted, hacking laugh.

“Womanizing was never my problem,” Young said, and then, sharply, “Whoa— get a fucking broom or something, would you? You’re going to slice your fingers open. _Both_ of us fucking crippled; that’s the last thing we need. Why do you spend so much time throwing sharp objects around my apartment?”

“To be perfectly accurate,” Rush said, carefully lifting the last visible piece of glass between two fingers, “this was not a sharp object when I came into contact with it.”

“Let me guess: you just have that effect on people.”

It was a surprisingly witty remark for Young. Rush squinted at him. But Young was still Young, blocky and dolt-faced, with his mop of irregular black curls.

“Yes, well,” Rush said. “In my experience, people could stand to be honed a little.”

“In my experience, that’s how you end up hurt,” Young said.

Rush huffed in exasperation and stood to empty the dustpan in the bin.

But he thought about what Young had said, later, when he saw a minute piece of glass shine between the edges of two floorboards and, going to pick it up, underestimated the sharpness of it. It pierced his skin and a drop of red blood welled up, outsize and insistent, from a wound that could hardly have been more than a pinprick. The blood kept coming after he’d squeezed the glass from his finger.

He stood at the sink, marvelling at the wound. The way it would not heal. The faint pain, later, when he was typing, when he pressed too hard on a key.

* * *

It was late afternoon and Rush had already washed the dishes from his artful lunch of compressed Asian pear and parsnip salad, pine nut quinoa, and parmesan foam— “Not bad,” Young had said thoughtfully, “considering I don’t even know what I’m eating, and I’m pretty sure that part of it is just air”— when his email client chimed quietly, alerting him to its receipt of a new message.

Of late, his email had consisted almost entirely of, in equal measure, messages from the Berkeley Computer Science Department faculty listserv (to which he remained subscribed in spite of his insistent efforts to free himself of it, and which had a habit of devolving into unpleasant ad hominem skirmishes between junior faculty and emeriti every few weeks) and spam from online retailers who hadn’t yet quite twigged to the notion that he did not wish to purchase music of either the sheet or recorded variety in the near future or indeed ever again. He mass-deleted it as required, and ignored most of what did not fall into either category, preferring to let it unproductively sit and perhaps hasten the day when he could protest that he could no longer receive messages because his inbox was full.

This message, however, was from DR. AMANDA PERRY and came associated with a chevron-mail.gov account, meaning Cheyenne Mountain. With a preemptive sense of irritation, he clicked on it and was redirected to log into his own Chevronmail account.

 _Dear Dr. Rush,_ the message began.

_It took approximately four hours for my technicians to realign the crystal array you reconfigured last week, and another hour to figure out what you had done to our detection equipment as, apparently, your time is too valuable to waste on delineating the rationale behind your destructive experimental setup. I’m sure you will be relieved to know that we have recalibrated the array and that there have been no lasting setbacks to our analysis of Ancient control crystals. Thanks so much for visiting my lab._

_That said: were you using specifically utilizing frequencies in the audible spectrum?_

_Sincerely,_

_Amanda Perry_

He frowned at the message. _Dear Dr. Perry_ , he sent back after a moment.

_Yes._

_Best wishes,_

_Dr. Nicholas Rush._

Having sent this email, he turned his attention to the question of what he was going to prepare for dinner. He was considering a smoked salmon and black pepper kale pasta with pumpkin seeds and corn cream, but had not entirely decided if he wanted to serve dessert. A sweet wine would pair well with such a menu for dessert, but he had not ordered any dessert wine. Would a Gewürztraminer prove sweet enough for the purpose?

He gazed at the ceiling and let his mind absently drift from wine towards the ninth cypher: the -1s, 0s, and 1s that made up its patterns, which at this point he could picture a good chunk of. He turned them over in his head, around and around. He had always been an intuitive visual thinker, as he suspected was true of most mathematicians, able to easily manipulate objects in space, though his real strength lay in sound, which he had discovered relatively late in his life.

He tried reversing the numbers to see if this altered his perspective. It did not.

He considered the problem of ternary addition and subtraction.

There was an imperfection in the ceiling. It was like a sour note, its sensory information striking his consciousness at an angle. He couldn’t look at it and calculate. The dark and irregular form stuck in his vision, making it hard for him to think.

The email client chimed.

_Dr. Rush,_

_I’m asking because I have some interest in Ancient musical systems, or rather in the possibility that the Ancients employed a form of coding that we might see as having an overlap with composing. Essentially, it was noise-based. I published a paper on it in the internal SGC journal. Actually, has anyone told you about the journal? It’s called_ Rosetta. _It’s all completely classified, just a way of sharing our work. If you’re interested, I can send you a copy of the paper._

_Sincerely,_

_Amanda Perry_

Rush’s mouth tightened. He hit Reply.

_I don’t care._

_Yours very sincerely,_

_Dr. Nicholas Rush._

But now he was aware of the flaw in the ceiling and could not think while it was present. Even if he redirected his gaze to the marble countertop, it remained there: a material mistuning above his head, out of concord with its surroundings.

He closed his eyes and raked his hair back from his face.

He clenched his hands into fists.

The email client chimed.

_Dr. Rush,_

_Well, if you’re interested in the effect of audible frequencies on Ancient crystals, it might still be worth your time for us to chat. The SGC has a secure server; just click this link. It won’t take a minute._

_Amanda Perry_

He hesitated. But she had said that it would not be about music. He needed the information. And, anyway, there was a difference between _music_ and _noise._

The link pulled up a site where he was prompted to enter his log-in, then shuttled him to a chatroom with one other participant.

 **AmandaPerry:** Hi  
**NicholasRush:** I’m interested in the native energetic configuration of crystals in a DHD.  
**AmandaPerry:** I might run into some S-T-T problems so if that happens  
**NicholasRush:** S-T-T?  
**AmandaPerry:** just over-look any spelling weirdness. I swear I speak English.  
**AmandaPerry:** sorry  
**AmandaPerry:** Speech to text.  
**NicholasRush:** Oh right.  
**NicholasRush:** Is that still being foisted upon government contractors? No one in his right mind would utilise a program with a minimal likelihood of achieving tolerable accuracy prior to the advent of meaningful AI.  
**AmandaPerry:** Your the computer guy I guess. Let’s talk crystals.  
**NicholasRush:** I’m in the process of devising the possible implementation of a solution to the eighth of nine cyphers embedded within the physical gate mechanism.  
**AmandaPerry:** Right the ones they’re trying to put in that game.  
**NicholasRush:** I’m sorry, what?  
**AmandaPerry:** The sci no sigh no no see I ciphers they want to code in the computer game they’re designing, right? So they can recruit a new codebreaker for the program? General Laundry talked to me about it.  
**NicholasRush:** Did he.  
**AmandaPerry:** In retrospect maybe I wasn’t supposed to tell you.  
**NicholasRush:** I don’t know anything about this.  
**AmandaPerry:** I’m sure it’s not a reflection on your work.  
**NicholasRush:** I just bet it’s not.  
**AmandaPerry:** Maybe we should just talk about crystals.  
**NicholasRush:** I believe the solution to the eighth cypher involves devising a Hamiltonian cycle for the seventy-four crystals of the DHD and eventuating such a cycle in the form of a current that passes through each crystal in a specific sequence of resonant frequencies. I understand that each crystal within a DHD has a native frequency?  
**AmandaPerry:** Yes that’s correct. We can program them artificially but four your purposes I don’t think that would work out. DHDs utilize an internal geometry to carry out there calculations and our a ray lacks the appropriate symmetry.  
**NicholasRush:** Fuck.  
**AmandaPerry:** Sorry.  
**NicholasRush:** I suppose that would have to be the case.  
**AmandaPerry:** I can off four you a diagram of the full set of crystals and their native frequencies if you stop by my office tomorrow.  
**NicholasRush:** Unfortunately that’s not possible.  
**AmandaPerry:** Yeah you sound like a guy who doesn’t get out much.  
**NicholasRush:** The Lucian Alliance is trying to abduct me at the moment.  
**AmandaPerry:** Oops. Forget I said that. How does the end of this week sound?  
**NicholasRush:** More plausible than tomorrow.  
**AmandaPerry:** I’ll schedule you in for a post abduction appointment.  
**NicholasRush:** Thank you.  
**AmandaPerry:** What made you think that resonant frequencies were involved in a Hamiltonian problem if you don’t mind me asking?  
**NicholasRush:** I was listening to a leafblower.  
**AmandaPerry:** You’re such a math guy.  
**NicholasRush:** What is that supposed to mean?  
**AmandaPerry:** I new you’d be offended.  
**NicholasRush:** What is it supposed to mean?  
**AmandaPerry:** Well let me tell you a joke I heard the other day.  
**NicholasRush:** If you must.  
**AmandaPerry:** Pythagoras, Gauss, Sophie Germain, and Schubert walk into a bar.  
**AmandaPerry:** I had to spell all those names out I hope you no.  
**AmandaPerry:** So their telling the bartender all about their jobs and the bartender asks them if they can give him some prime examples of their work.  
**AmandaPerry:** Pythagoras says, 173 37 5 29… stop me, I could go on!  
**AmandaPerry:** Gauss says, 199 107 167 139… stop me, I could go on!  
**AmandaPerry:** Sophie Germain says, 131 11 7 53 5 2 113… stop me, I could go on!  
**AmandaPerry:** So Schubert shakes his head and he turns two the bar tender. He sets down his glass and starts singing Die Schone Mullerin.  
**AmandaPerry:** which I also had to spell. He sings G# E C A and then says very seriously…. stop me, I could go on!  
**AmandaPerry:** Anyway so that’s the joke. I have to run though so e-mail me if you want two stop by my office.  
  
_[AmandaPerry has left the chatroom.]_

Rush stared at the computer screen, perplexed.

Perry’s joke did not appear to be funny. It did not even appear to be a joke. There was no internal logic— only several famous mathematicians reciting excerpts from the prime sequences they had given their names to, followed by Schubert singing several random notes from a Lied or Lieder cycle that had nothing whatsoever to do with primes. So outrageously un-joke-like was it in form and effect, as a matter of fact, that it immediately suggested itself to be something _other_ than a joke, which raised the question of its real purpose.

He looked to one side, at the blank wall.

He pressed the tips of his fingers to the marble countertop.

It was _impossible_ for him to _think_ like this, while the ceiling was—

After a while, he rose and went to the coffee table, where Young had left a pen and a stack of paper in a file folder. The paper was printed on one side only. Rush collected several sheets of it and carried it, along with the pen, back to his workspace at the kitchen island.

One the back of one of the sheets of paper, he wrote the sequence of Pythagorean prime numbers. He wrote the Gaussian primes across the back of the next, then the Sophie Germain primes. Finally, and with only the slightest flinch, he wrote the opening melody line of Schubert’s "Das Wandern," the first of the song cycle, and— after a moment— followed it with the melody of "Das Feierabend," the only song in the cycle in which the phrase "Die schöne Müllerin" appeared.

He looked at what he had written. At the computer screen. Then back.

It was a very cleverly formed little riddle, tailored, he thought, by someone who knew him. Even among mathematicians, not many people would be familiar with Schubert, nor have a pitch-perfect recall of his melodies in their heads.

The white of the white paper where he had left off writing was very white, in spite of the printed ink on the other side. He was aware of the flaw in the ceiling and it was very loud now. He felt slightly nauseous.

He picked up the pen and wrote, in very neat precise block capitals, READ YOUR MEDICAL FILE.

173 37 5 29199 107 167 139131 11 7 53 5 2 113  G# E C A.

Stop me, he thought, half-hysterically. I could go on. Stop me.

Stop me.

Someone would probably try.

But if he was sick, then so what? Sick enough not to solve the cyphers? No. Surely. He knew what it looked like to be that sick.

His ears were ringing.

E E C B A G# A. That was how “Die Feierabend” began.

And the discordant E flat that was not an E flat. The scuffmark or crack or site where the painter’s hand had shaken while reaching too high, high above Rush’s head.

For some reason he covered his ears, and then flung the pen across the room. It struck the wall and rebounded to lie under the TV cabinet. This did little to relieve his distress, so he went in search of white paint, but then realised that Young was unlikely to own any. Tipp-Ex, then, he thought, or— what was it that university students used? Toothpaste.

But could he reach, even if he stood on the kitchen island? Not immediately evident. Just to be on the safe side, when he had gathered two types of toothpaste from the bathroom (not sure whether Young’s or his own would provide the more appropriate white), he picked up a hammer that was resting on an inexplicably tiny table in the hallway. He was not certain what he hoped to accomplish with the hammer, but he was sure that it would come to him.

He moved his laptop to the couch, then carefully climbed on top of a barstool. From there, it was only a very small step onto the island, which was cool under the soles of his bare feet. He stood there, gazing up at the ceiling, for a while: the hammer in one hand, the two tubes of toothpaste in the other. The dark spot on the ceiling buzzed. It was a crack; he thought that it was a crack. He transferred the two tubes of toothpaste to his right hand and lifted his left until he could touch the crack, wonderingly. He was amazed that the world would sing in E flat, but it was _not quite_ E flat, and how was he supposed to think in a world that went on being out of tune? If the world were going to sing, then it seemed like a basic courtesy to try and get the notes right.

“What the _fuck?_ ”

Maybe the hammer would be best after all.

“Rush!”

Rush turned his head slowly and looked Young.

Young, who was standing at the entrance to the kitchen stared at him.

Rush became abruptly aware that he was barefoot on the marble countertop of Young’s kitchen island, holding two tubes of toothpaste and a hammer, and that he likely appeared quite insane.

“I,” he said.

When it became clear that he was not going to complete the sentence, Young said, “You what?”

“I— threw your pen across the room.” It seemed as good a thing to say as any.

There was a long pause.

Young said, “Okay?”

“It believe it’s currently under the television stand.” Rush pointed.

“Right,” Young said, and didn’t move. “Do you want to maybe… give me the hammer?”

Rush hesitated, then, crouching meekly at the edge of the countertop, did.

“And…?” Young gestured.

It took Rush a moment to apprehend that Young was indicating he ought to desert the island and resume a more standard position on the floor.

He was aware of Young’s humiliating eye upon him as he made the step onto the unsteady barstool and lowered himself in increments till the soles of his feet touched wood.

“There was,” he said lamely, thinking to explain what was in essence an inexplicable position, “a crack. In your ceiling.”

“A crack,” Young said. His face was unreadable.

“Yes.”

“And you were going to—“ But Young’s attention was distracted. “Are those _classified documents?_ Are you writing on _classified documents?_ ”

He was indicating the pages that Rush had spread across the counter.

“Possibly,” Rush said, and made a grab for them, because he did not want Young to read what he had written there.

“Hand them over,” Young said.

Rush held them against his chest.

“You can’t just _write on classified documents!_ You don’t have clearance for that shit!”

“I didn’t _read_ them,” Rush said, soaking his voice in disdain. “ _Obviously._ And at any rate, I’m going to burn them. Right now. I’m going to burn them right now.” He had not thought of it before, but it seemed like an excellent idea. If Jackson— for it was certainly Jackson who had come up with the absurd little riddle, Jackson who was too clever for his own good and had invited Rush to the symphony— had found it necessary to so elaborately encode and deliver the message, Rush ought to conceal that he had received it.

He needed a cigarette, anyway.

“You’re not going to _burn_ them,” Young said sounding incredulous. “I need those!”

“Oh, please. Spare me. Every time a pen touches a piece of paper, your organization requires that the ensuing mark be filed in triplicate.” Rush was already heading for the balcony, Young having confined all cigarette-smoking to the balcony on the first day of their cohabitation, following a brief and bad-tempered discussion of which Rush was not particularly proud.

“ _Rush!”_

Rush pulled his lighter from his pocket as he slid the balcony door open, and before Young could catch up to him, the wavering flame had caught on the edges of the paper and they were curling black-edged in his hand. He let them drop into the novelty mug that he had appropriated for use as an ashtray, and which read: MAY THE AIR FORCE BE WITH YOU.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Young demanded from just behind Rush. He sounded like he wasn’t sure if he had intended the question rhetorically or not.

Rush tapped a cigarette out of the pack he had been carrying in his pocket and bent to light it from the lingering flames of the documents. “I’m feeling quite spry today, thank you.”

“Yeah, I could tell from the way you climbed up on my kitchen island and were ready to take a hammer to my goddamn ceiling!”

“There was a crack,” Rush said, attempting to control the tone of his voice. He was unable to evaluate his success, but thought from the look on Young’s face when he glanced over his shoulder that it had been minimal. He lifted the cigarette to his lips and inhaled unsteadily. “There was a _crack._ ”

Young didn’t say anything, and after a moment Rush turned, prepared to be defiant.

But Young was simply studying him, looking exhausted, standing perhaps a bit nearer than Rush had thought. “You could start a fucking wildfire,” he said. “You know that, right? If you’re not careful.”

Rush had no response to this. “Yes, well,” he said, and ashed the end of his cigarette into the coffee mug.

“Happens all the time in the summer around here.”

Rush shrugged and looked down.

Young sighed. “Please don’t wreck my apartment.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Rush returned, rather more feebly than he’d wanted.

“Just— try to hold it together, okay?”

Rush stared at the balcony’s cement floor. It was warm. He pressed his feet flat against it. The afternoon light had started dying away, but even so, warmth still lingered. He had liked that in California, or had not ever decided that he did not like it. It was a soft-hearted climate, always letting you keep some secret radiation against the cold that was to come. Unrealistic, he thought, but it had not seemed unrealistic in California. For a long time. Then he had realised it was not a kindness, at the end.

“Did you know that Stargate Command is getting into the video game business?” he asked, when several seconds had passed in silence.

Young appeared puzzled by the non sequitur. “What?”

“They want to embed the gate cyphers into some sort of video game for infants. To recruit a new cryptographer for the program, apparently.”

There was no reason to think Young had known, of course, and his reaction confirmed this; he seemed weary, more than anything else, as though Rush had increased the gravity in his specific location, perhaps by a hundred and fifty percent, and Young could feel all the small extra exertions required for his body to function. He leant back against the glass door and shut his eyes.

“It’s an absurd idea,” Rush continued, using the hand holding his cigarette to over-punctuate the statement. “Even leaving aside the issue of automated proof checking, which, believe me, is _not_ an insignificant one in mathematical terms, there’s the question of an alien language, an alien numerical system, an alien _approach to the concept of numbers themselves_ , not to mention the mechanisms of the gate itself, which Stargate Command would presumably like to keep classified, but which factor considerably into the function of the cyphers. The only reasonable conclusion, the only _possible_ conclusion, if they’re poised to invest in such a ludicrous fucking project, is that they don’t believe I’m going to solve the last two ciphers.”

“Rush—“ Young began.

“They don’t believe,” Rush said, raising his voice and stabbing at the air to conceal the fact that his hand was shaking, “that I’m going to solve the last two ciphers, because they think that something quite fatal or otherwise unpleasantly final is going to happen to me. Something that they are unlikely or unable to be able to prevent.”

“That’s not what this is,” Young said. “It’s not what it looks like. We don’t give up on people.”

But his face was tight with unhappiness, and he was biting his lip.

Rush ground his cigarette out viciously against the base of the mug. “Oh, don’t look so fucking distressed. It hardly matters, except—“

And then Young was saying, “What do you mean it hardly _matters_? Of course it _matters,_ it fucking matters, okay? We don’t _give up on people_ —“

And Rush had to talk over him: “—for the fact that I _am_ going to solve the cyphers. It wouldn’t even be worthy of my fucking attention, I wouldn’t even _protest_ , except that I _am_ going to solve them. _I_ am. _I_ am going to dial the ninth chevron, and—

“No one’s going to leave you to the Lucian Alliance, Rush,” Young said. “It’s not going to happen.”

“Of course it’s not going to happen; I _know_ it’s not going to happen; _nothing_ is going to keep me apart from those cyphers. Not you and not Jackson and not the Lucian Alliance, and certainly, _certainly_ not Stargate fucking Command! So if you think that—“

“Rush,” Young said urgently. “Rush.”

Young was holding him by the shoulders. Perhaps trying to steady him. His fingers dug into the soft tissue of Rush’s muscles. Rush felt trapped for a moment, unable to push him away. He stared at Young, at Young’s tired face and agonised expression.

“Just—“ Young said hoarsely. “Just— hold it together.”

He had already said that.

Rush said, his voice sounding stretched and taut, “Till when?”

And perhaps Young would have answered that. Perhaps his answer would have astounded Rush with its eloquence and insight. Perhaps it would have inspired him and put all his fears to bed— not that he had fears, because he did not have fears; he thought that he lacked the capacity to be afraid, or at the very least to experience fear, the two not being the same thing, or not precisely. His body felt afraid of things, sometimes, though he never did. Case in point: he was trembling slightly in Young’s grip though he was quite calm and clear-headed. He stared at Young, holding his breath slightly— waiting—

That was when Young’s mobile rang.

Young flinched and pulled away. His hand went to his pocket, pulling the phone out. “I’ve got to take this,” he said. “It’s Mitchell. Just— stay here and don’t _do_ anything for a couple minutes, okay? I’m leaving the door open. Smoke another cigarette if you have to. Don’t burn anything down.”

“Fine,” Rush snapped, unsure of why he suddenly felt more agitated.

He watched as Young wandered indoors, answering the phone— “Yeah, hey, Cam. What’s up?”— and switching a lamp on, a scene that was both peculiar and domestic. Young was wearing the stupid fucking medical brace that kept his spine intact, or whatever was the nature of its purpose; his hand was pressed just above the curve of his hip, hinting at some unseen and persistent trauma. Rush wondered what Young’s damaged body looked like underneath its clothing, and then swiftly repressed the thought, and then allowed it to rise once more to the surface, because it was a clinical concern: could he depend on Young to protect him? How severe, precisely, were Young’s injuries?

He was not in the habit of depending on anyone to protect him.

He turned and walked to the edge of the balcony, gripping its railing with both hands. Now that Young was gone, the inside of his head expanded to include the faint and distant ringing the E flat that was not an E flat, the awareness of the crack in the kitchen ceiling, Amanda Perry’s musical coding, his medical file waiting in some Cheyenne Mountain cabinet.

He did not like to live places where the horizon was full of mountains.

They had eaten each other trying to cross those mountains, the haphazard American pioneers, even though they had been able to see where they were going. And they had looked down from those mountains at the deserts of Colorado, or at the Great Salt Lake, and thought, Thank God, at last, an easy road ahead. They had not understood the complexities of climate or biome; they had not foreseen the desperation that could strip a man of everything that might once have been called manly in him; they had killed everyone who might have trod the path before them, and then they had struck out blindly into the unknown, having faith in a general set of rules that governed all portions of the universe. In the end, when at last they had been reduced to defleshing the corpses of brothers and friends, perhaps they had repented of this heresy. This misconception.

Rush started as, from inside the apartment, he heard the muffled sound of a hand hitting a hard surface. Something shattered.

He closed his eyes and, feeling inexplicably desolate, folded his arms over his head.


	9. Chapter 9

“Yeah, hey, Cam,” Young said, heading inside the apartment. He took the opportunity to switch on a lamp against the coming evening. “What’s up?”

“Are you alone?” Mitchell asked. His voice was tense, edgy.

Young stopped midway through the room, resting his hand against a wall. “I mean, Rush is right outside, but— yeah. Why?”

Mitchell didn’t say anything for a moment.

“Cam,” Young said, his throat going abruptly dry.

“Listen,” Mitchell said. “Something’s happened.”

Young stayed motionless where he was standing. “Yeah.”

“You know that, uh, Telford took control of SG-3 after he left your place on Friday night.”

“Yeah,” Young said again.

“They interrogated those three Lucian prisoners, and got the codes to beam onto their tel’tak. The one that was cloaked in low Earth orbit. They wanted intel; they took out the crew on the ship and copied the database. Sent it to the Mountain. Telford wanted to keep going, scam his way through the ship’s next check-in, but the thing is, they were Sixth House, and there was a chance—“

“That they would know who he was,” Young said in a low voice.

Telford had been undercover with Sixth House for almost a year, before the attack on P2S-569 had gotten him recalled to Earth. He’d been fucked-up about the attack, as fucked-up as David got, Young thought; if Young was telling the truth, they both had been. A lot of good people had died, and David hadn’t done anything to stop it. In public, he’d always insisted that he’d made the right call, but in private— And Young had blamed him, then didn’t, or had still blamed him, or hadn’t known what to feel, or had felt, like David, desperate to feel anything at all; _You’re so fucking good,_ David had said, _all the time, I don’t know how you stand it,_ and Young had said, _I’m not_ , and David had looked away, squinting like he was in pain, and said, _No, I guess— I guess no one is._

So that had been when the two of them had— done whatever it was they’d done. But David had wanted to go back undercover from the start, had insisted he could still be an asset on the inside, and eventually he’d gotten his way, like he always got his way, and that was when the brass had sent him to Sest Bet.

“Yeah,” Mitchell said. “Yeah. Landry didn’t want to risk it. So he gave the order for them to pull out, and Telford did manage to change course, he was turning the ship around, but—“

Young could hear him breathing on the other end of the line.

He stared at the wall, not quite white now with the light from the lamp falling on it. There was probably a scientific reason that the color changed. Rush would know how the reason, he was sure.

“They missed their check-in,” Mitchell said. “And the one after that.”

“Right,” Young said.

“We haven’t heard from them in seven hours.”

“Well, that’s—“ He could think of a dozen reasons why a gate team might not check in for seven hours. More, probably.

“They sent the _Odyssey_ to check it out,” Mitchell said.

Young closed his eyes.

“They found, uh—“ Mitchell stopped. “They found a lot of debris. Some of which was— organic.”

For some reason Young was thinking inanely about David asking to borrow his book, the casual way he’d insulted Young’s intelligence, which he was always doing, really; since they first met, down in New Mexico, David had always been the smarter one, sort of angry about it, the way Rush was, and wearing it like a type of armor that wasn’t actually armor, because it wasn’t defensive— more made of swords.

“But the thing is— there wasn’t as much debris as you would expect for— for six bodies. So we think the ship was destroyed to try and hide the fact that maybe, maybe—“

“Some of them were alive,” Young supplied flatly. “The Lucians beamed them off.”

He had liked that David was smarter. He didn’t mind getting needled. David was honest about it with him, at least, and Young preferred that; when he made it home from P2S-569, David had seemed like the only honest thing in his life, the only real, hard, tangible, urgent body, still smelling slightly of deep space in a way Young couldn’t put his finger on, and tasting of sweat and darkness and the metallic compounds of an asteroid base.

“Yeah,” Mitchell said. “They could be alive. They could have— _been_ alive.”

David was so good at being ever-so-slightly dangerous, and then, just when you thought you were fucked, turning out to actually be the thing that you could always count on. He was unkillable, immortal, the last survivor; _All that’s gonna be left,_ he’d said, all white teeth, smiling, _at the end of the day, is the cockroaches and me._

“Landry’s giving them 48 hours,” Mitchell said. “Till he deactivates their GDOs. So he must think— I mean— we’re not calling the game at this point.“

Maybe they’d been talking about the bomb, then, when David had said that, sitting in the back of Young’s pick-up truck, outside the Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, where they’d gone once to see the decommissioned war planes, the sky overhead an unreal blue that you never got anywhere else on the planet, and out in the distance the scrubby, seething, irradiated ridge of the Sandias—

He was in the hallway, he realized, although he couldn’t remember walking into the hallway.

He had a strong sensation that he was going to throw up.

“I’m sorry, V,” Mitchell said. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.”

Maybe he’d had an idea that he would shut himself in his bedroom. But he couldn’t do that, because he had to look after Rush. He had to make sure Rush wasn’t getting kidnapped by the Lucian Alliance, or taking a hammer to something, or setting the whole city of Colorado Springs on fire.

“What’s going to,” Young said. His heart was beating really fast, and it unnerved him. “Happen to, I mean, with Rush, now, because he’s not really _dealing_ with any of this well, I mean, to start with, and if the LA has David—“

“I don’t think it’s been decided,” Mitchell said, but he sounded cagey.

“What the fuck does _that_ mean?”

“Look, just— Jackson wants to send him to Atlantis, get him out of the whole situation, but Telford was very, like _very intensely_ opposed to that idea, and there’s a lot of political stuff going on that this is going to throw a big ol’ wrench in the middle of; the brass would _love_ to lock him up somewhere the Lucians can’t find him, but—“

“I don’t think—“ Young started.

“—obviously that’s not looking like such a hot proposition at the moment—“

“—that would be such a great idea,” Young finished in an unsteady rush.

Mitchell paused for a long second. “Yeah. So in the meantime, until things clear up a little and we know exactly what’s going on, I think everyone likes him where he is.”

“At my place.”

“Yes.”

“ _Fuck_ that. Fuck this whole shitty—“ Young stopped and tried to get a hold of his voice. The back of his throat ached. His head felt hot. “Why was Jackson here?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Mitchell said, just a little bit evasive.

“Yes, you do. You called him. Friday night. You _must_ have called him. He showed up in his goddamn pajamas about ten minutes after David’s team cleared the building, knocking on my door, wanting to talk to Rush, and when he found out David was there, he didn’t want the two of them left alone together, so why did you call him, Cam; why the fuck did you call him; what the _fuck_ is going on?”

“Everett—“

“Why was he on that tel’tak, Cam?” He had lost the battle over his voice. It was too loud, but he couldn’t make it quiet. “If he got blown to fucking _organic debris_ in some assfuck region of outer space, then I think I deserve to know why, because, sure, he was a son of a bitch, but he—

“ _Everett._ ” Mitchell’s voice cut through him. “There is a lot of shit going on that I _cannot discuss with you_ right now, and if you will take a goddamn breath and get your shit together for a second, you will realize that _you know this_. So just— sit the fuck down and soldier the fuck up, okay?”

Young pressed his forehead against the wall and sucked in a breath. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Shit, don’t apologize,” Mitchell said. He sounded beaten-down. “Jesus. Just— we’ve all just gotta put our heads down and push through this. Maybe David shows up tomorrow, pops out of a cake. _Surprise, bitches!_ That’s the kind of shit he’s always got me expecting.”

Young’s breath caught on a laugh that was not a laugh, that hurt the inside of his throat. He swallowed hard. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Yeah.”

“So just— keep an eye on Rush. Stay in touch with the downstairs team. I’ll call you when I know more. You know I will.”

“Okay,” Young whispered.

He heard Mitchell hesitate, as though he were going to say something more. But in the end Mitchell hung up the phone.

Young kept his own phone raised to his ear. It wasn’t like he thought he was going to hear anything; he knew Mitchell was gone, but if he put the phone down, then he’d have to consider what to do next, and he didn’t know how to even begin that process.

He felt— wrong, he thought. What was he supposed to feel like? What were you supposed to feel like when they guy you used to fuck got blown to smithereens, maybe, but also maybe was being to tortured to death? It seemed like there’d probably be a pretty wide range of acceptable responses. But he just felt sick; he felt sick, sick, sick; he had the distinct and nauseating sense that his body was splitting in two, right down the middle, and half of it was absolutely murderous while the other half felt nothing at all, or half of it was shaky as an AB coming out of his first zero-g mission while the other half was indifferent, or worse— worse than indifferent.

What the fuck, he thought to himself. What the fuck. Had he really been that angry at David, just because David had said they still shouldn’t fuck anymore, even after they’d dragged each other up the fucking side of that caldera, both of them more dead than alive? Young hadn’t even _cared_ , he hadn’t even _wanted_ to; he’d just felt sick every time he _looked_ at David, and he’d known that David could tell, because David had stayed away. So they’d both gotten what they wanted. They’d both gotten what they _fucking_ wanted.

“You bastard,” he whispered, hating himself, and didn’t know who he was talking to.

He couldn’t make the two halves of his body work together. Maybe that was what the pins and screws were for. For exactly this kind of situation.

At some point he limped into the bathroom, but he didn’t throw up, even when he thought about the organic debris that might once have been David— might once have been skin that he had touched. Instead he folded his arms on the sink and bent to rest his head on top of them. He felt too tired to even stand.

A spike of rage that he could not explain ran through him at that thought, when he thought about how tired he was, and how sooner or later he would have to stand, and it would hurt, and it would go on hurting. Before he could really process what he was doing, he reared away— the muscles of his lower back screaming— and hammered his fist into the mirror, hard.

It felt like knives between his knuckles, which it more-or-less was, because the mirror, of course, shattered. He was left looking at a broken picture of himself with pieces missing, cracks radiating outward across his face in crooked lines.

The image unnerved him. He stared at it before realizing that his hand was leaking blood— then swore and hastily picked piece of glass out of the sink basin, pitching them in the trash so he could turn the cold tap on. The water did a little to dilute the blood, but not much.

“I suppose it’s just as well that neither of us is overly careful about his appearance,” Rush said from behind him.

Young looked up. He could see Rush in the mirror, leaning against the doorway, his reflection similarly split by cracks. “There was an— accident,” he said with difficulty.

Rush nodded slowly. He looked down, tracing the shape of a tile with the toes of one foot. “I take it this means Colonel Mitchell was not calling to relate that the techs have finally cleared my apartment.”

Young flexed his fingers slowly and let the pain’s root system spread out through them. “David is—“ he said, and then stopped.

There was a silence.

“Ah,” Rush said softly. His head was lowered; it was impossible for Young to see his face.

“Missing,” Young said. “His ship was destroyed. There’s some reason to think that he might still— that he might not be—“ He stopped again.

Rush stayed in the same position for a moment, not looking at him. Then he seemed to draw a breath and stepped forward, his expression carefully neutral. “I’m assuming you’ve a first aid kit on hand,” he said. “For these occasions when you feel the need to let fly your passions.”

“—It’s in the cabinet,” Young said.

Rush fished it out and began briskly daubing water and blood from Young’s knuckles with gauze. “At the very least, I suppose I can celebrate that this robs you of the moral high ground when it comes to the matter of who is more likely to destroy your apartment.”

Young winced. “Yeah, I kind of—“ But he was helpless to explain, so he fell silent again, and watched as Rush started to wrap the gauze between his fingers.

After a long silence, Rush said at last, “Is alive better, or not, do you think?”

Young shut his eyes. “Please don’t ask me that question.”

Rush paused in his ministrations, then resumed without comment.

Young watched blood seep through the gauze and tried to see shapes and figures in its patterns, like an ink blot test made out of himself. Or was it really himself anymore? When his blood left his body, did it stop being him? He saw a flower, a sun, a flying saucer.

Gradually, as the gauze grew in layers, there was less blood than there had been.

“Were you fucking him?” Rush asked, in the same casual tone he’d used before. “David?”

Young turned his head away, too tired to be angry. “No,” he said, with effort.

Rush nodded as though this was what he had expected. “Not anymore, or wanted to?”

“Is it that obvious?”

Rush secured the gauze and held Young’s hand up to inspect his work with a critical eye. “Yes,” he said. He released Young’s hand.

Young folded it against his chest, feeling oddly naked. He said, hearing the defeat in his voice, “Not anymore.”

“I see.” Rush looked down again, his hair falling in front of his face and again obscuring his expression for a moment, before he tucked it back behind his ears. “I suppose I understand why you’d find the news distressing.”

“It was over a long time ago,” Young said. “Before I got hurt.”

“Because your wife found out.”

“Yeah. Yes. It wasn’t—“ Young hesitated. “She misunderstood the situation.”

“It wasn’t an affair,” Rush said, his voice flat. “Is that it?”

“No,” Young said. “I mean, yeah. It wasn’t.”

“Just two old mates working out some tension. You didn’t love him, of course; no emotion at all involved, because that would be _unmanly_ , and we can’t have that—“

Young wasn’t, after all, too tired to be angry, it turned out. “Fuck you,” he said.

“—Sex, yes; divorce, well, women are always so hysterical about these things, but _emotion—“_

Young shoved Rush against the wall, so hard that Rush’s head rebounded, then left the room without a word.

He didn’t know where he was going, because nowhere in the apartment really felt like home. It was a series of strange rooms that he had half-filled with his possessions, most of them new and some that didn’t even belong to him, things Emily and he had shared that she hadn’t wanted. Even their home hadn’t felt like home. When he thought of home he imagined no particular place at all. Or the backcountry of Wyoming, maybe, where he’d grown up, just shy of the Bighorn Mountains, where you could ride for hours and not see another human being.

It had been so simple to survive there, if you knew how the land worked. Maybe that was all that home was, a place where you knew how the land worked, enough to survive. He thought it sounded easy, but it wasn’t. There were so many different types of survival. You could know how to hunt deer and filter water, how to stay warm in a snowstorm, and not know how to have a conversation with your wife. He could have lasted a winter out in the Bighorns, but everywhere else on earth he just kept leaving, or else getting his leaving papers handed to him. Even David, in the end, had said, _Look, Everett, I’m always going to have your back. Always. I love you like that, you know? And it’s been fun. But I don’t want you ruining your life over something that’s just not—_

 _Yeah_ , Young had said. _I get it._

He did get it. He got it. Had gotten it even then.

He was out on the balcony, his hands gripping the iron rail. It was dark now, or not completely dark, but one of the later stages of twilight, and a light had gone on at the side of the building, making everything look false and flat.

He got it. So why did he feel—

His chest was trying to separate itself into pieces.

Something clinked, and he turned to see that Rush had set a bottle of white wine on the patio table. Rush was holding two wine glasses in one hand by the stems.

“I’m sorry,” Rush said, not very apologetically. Young had never heard someone say _I’m sorry_ in such an aggressive tone of voice. “I’m a bastard. Let’s get pissed.”

Young bent his head and barked out a laugh, even though it wasn’t funny. “All right,” he said. “Yeah, sure. Why not?”

So they sat in the two patio chairs and drank the wine, which was the wrong thing to be drinking, and which David would have made fun of, probably. After a while Rush lit a cigarette, the faint glow of it attracting one or two moths in the growing darkness. He had his feet propped up on the railing, exposed to the warm air. It was the kind of easy pose that Young would never again be able to get his body into, which didn’t matter, of course, except for when it did.

“It’s of some relevance to me, you know,” Rush said, when both their glasses of wine were close to empty. “Whether alive is better or not.”

Young tipped his head back, gazing up at the thin scattering of visible stars. “Rush—“

“No one thinks they can protect me. Not even your general thinks he can.”

“You could go to Atlantis.”

“You sound like Jackson,” Rush said with a thin smile.

“Maybe it’s not a bad idea.”

Rush shook his head without speaking. He lifted the wine bottle and refilled both their cups.

“If David was the only thing stopping you—“ Young said.

“No.” Rush stared down at his wine glass for a moment. “What do they do to their prisoners? The Lucian Alliance?”

“I’m not going to tell you that, hotshot,” Young said. He was surprised at how gentle the words came out. He hadn’t consciously chosen to make them gentle.

“Don’t you think I deserve to know?”

“I think you deserve not to.”

Rush nodded, as though this made sense. He pushed his hair behind his ear, but Young couldn’t read his expression. “I suppose,” he said at last, “at the very least, I suppose they’ll need me… _intact_ enough to solve the ciphers for them. To teach them how to dial the nine-chevron address, and take them to wherever it leads.”

Young studied him. He was pretty sure that Rush was trying to change the subject, although not one hundred percent sure, because Rush’s social skills were shit. “Where do _you_ think it leads?” he asked, willing to play along.

“How should I know?” Rush gave him a brief flash of a complicated smile. “I’m only a consultant, after all.”

“Yeah, right.”

The smile faded. “David wants— wanted— to be the one to go. Wherever it leads. When I succeeded.”

“Yeah?” Young took a long drink at the mention of David, and wished that Rush had brought something stronger than wine out with him. “Is that what him and Jackson are fighting about?”

“How should I know?” Rush said again, in precisely the same tone. “I’m uninterested in the minutiae of personnel decisions. The only thing I care about is the math.”

“Yeah, right,” Young said: his own echo. “I bet you want to go too, don’t you?”

Rush’s shoulders slanted forward slightly in a defensive hunch. He ground out his cigarette with unnecessary violence in the makeshift ashtray. “As though that were ever an option.”

Young _hmm_ ed. “I don’t know. I mean, sure, you’re batshit crazy, and kind of an asshole, and I’m not saying I’d be surprised if I found out you’d murdered a guy back in Scotland, or maybe, like, more than one guy, but it’s not like the program recruits any of us on account of how we’re bastions of personal stability, really.”

“Yes, well.” Rush relaxed slightly. “I suppose that’s true.”

The conversation seemed to die there. They’d killed the bottle of wine by that point, but Rush, unasked, rose and went to get another one from the kitchen, and so they drank more as the night’s real dark set in. Young wasn’t normally a lightweight, but he hadn’t eaten anything in hours, and he could feel the alcohol going to his head, making the world a little fuzzier and maybe more bearable. He’d take a painkiller later, maybe, and that would help; he wouldn’t feel so rubbed-raw, almost skinless.

Eventually, Rush said, “Jackson believes that none of us should go. Not me, not David… he’s opposed to the nine-chevron address in principle and practice.”

“Why’s that?”

Rush shrugged faintly. “I believe he’s afraid of what might happen. Where it might lead to.”

Young said carefully, “You know, Jackson’s usually right about stuff like that.”

“He’ll kill the entire Icarus Project if he can.” Rush’s voice was hard suddenly. “And if David is truly—“ He stopped, and set his mouth in a thin line. “I liked David,” he said softly, and pushed his wine glass away from him on the table. “I shouldn’t have had so much to drink. Fuck.”

“Killing a science project doesn’t sound like Jackson,” Young said, because he wasn’t prepared to engage with the other topic. He should have taken a painkiller before leaving the apartment to begin with. He’d had an excuse, given the state of his hand, and he wasn’t going to around punching any more mirrors, at this point, but he could feel it in his stomach, whatever he was feeling. With an almost physical effort he swallowed it back. He cleared his throat. “Anyway, as long as Icarus looks like offering us anything at all to fight the Ori, or the Lucian Alliance, for that matter, there’s no _way_ the top brass are writing it off, even on Jackson’s say-so. You’re stuck with us— or, I should say, we’re stuck with _you_ , which I assume is what you wanted. No getting out of this one.”

Rush’s mouth quirked, but with what looked almost like unhappiness. Less of a quirk than a pained twist. “Yes,” he said, folding his arms tight across his chest. “That’s what I wanted. Of course that’s what I wanted.”

“…Right,” Young said uncertainly. “You don’t seem very happy about it.”

“How would you know? You don’t fucking know me.” Rush stood abruptly, shoving his chair back. “You think you _know_ me now, as though we’re _friends_ , when you’re effectively my fucking jailer? You don’t. You don’t know me at all. You’re not capable of it.”

“I’m not your jailer, Rush,” Young said shortly. He didn’t think he had the energy to deal with another one of Rush’s outbursts; he didn’t even try to get up from the table.

“ _David_ knew me. _Not_ you, with your fucking—“ Rush gestured towards the inside of the apartment, his mouth working as he apparently tried and failed to come up with something insulting to say. “—half-finished ceiling and your cardboard boxes that you haven’t even _pretended_ to be unpacking, in spite of your half-hearted and frankly laughable attempts to present a front of— of— of fucking _hypermasculine normativity_ —“

Young waited a beat, expecting more to follow. “Seriously?” he asked at last, amused in spite of himself, when nothing did. “That’s the worst you could come up with? The boxes?”

Rush raked a hand through his hair, looking sulky and a little bit defeated. “I could hardly keep going on about your womanizing, all things considered.”

“You realize I don’t even know what ‘hypermasculine normativity’ means.”

“I can’t tell you how astonished I am to hear it.”

Young made a sudden decision and stood, levering himself up from his chair with some effort. “You know what? You’re right. I should’ve unpacked by now. It’s stupid. And us sitting around getting drunk and feeling sorry for ourselves isn’t going to do any good; we might as well get something done while we’re— waiting.” His voice had been strong until the end, then turned just the slightest bit hoarse when he said _waiting_.

Waiting to hear if David was dead.

He looked away from Rush and bit his lip, not wanting to let Rush see any hint of something that might serve as ammo.

But Rush didn’t latch onto the moment of weakness. After a second he said, “So now I’m expected to do your unpacking, as well?”

“What do you mean, as well? All you’ve done so far is almost destroy my ceiling, cook a bunch of weird food, and order, like, seven thousand dollars’ worth of weird kitchen equipment on the Pentagon’s dime, which, by the way, you know they audit that shit, right?”

“I’m more than confident in my ability to justify my expenses,” Rush said loftily.

“Well, good, cause you’re gonna need to.” Young picked up the mostly-empty wine bottle and glasses. He gestured. “After you.”

Rush gave him a suspicious glance, as though he thought that Young might be playing some kind of elaborate prank on him. But after a minute, he went inside, pausing at the last minute to snatch what Young was carrying from him. “I didn’t bandage your hand for you to fuck it up at the first opportunity,” he said brusquely, and stomped off, or as close as he could get in bare feet.

Young watched him go, head tilted, surprised by the gesture. Not sure what to make of it, exactly, just— surprised.

* * *

It was late by the time Rush had worked his way through mocking Young’s t-shirts, his high school yearbooks, his hockey trophies, and his collection of military magazines, and had gotten around to opening a box of Young’s old CDs, which made his eyes light up like someone had given him an early Christmas present. The ensuing tirade, which ranged from the sins of the so-called alt-rock movement to the failings (moral, political, and cultural) of modern country music, lasted him through unpacking most of the box. He seemed to really be enjoying it, so Young tuned him out tolerantly, contributing an occasional “Yeah” or “Uh-huh” when it seemed appropriate, along with— once or twice— “I guess I never really thought of it that way.”

Rush either didn’t notice or didn’t care, even when Young stopped watching him unpack and wandered into the kitchen to eat some peanuts and open a bag of chips; he managed to be condescending about the “shallow and pseudo-feminist aesthetic” of the Dixie Chicks’ political efforts for as long as Young stood leaning against the kitchen island, holding a bag of Haunted Ghost Pepper Doritos and gazing up at the shadow on the ceiling with a thoughtful look. When Young put the chips away and headed to the hall closet, Rush was giving some kind of lecture about selective national memory and race in the cult of the cowboy, and when Young came back carrying a ladder and a tube of spackling, he’d reached small farms and the phobia of industrialization, which apparently had something to do with Frankenstein.

He was still drinking, so Young guessed this was Rush drunk, which was kind of endearing. He watched for a second while Rush unsteadily alphabetized his CDs on the TV stand’s built-in shelf. Then he set the ladder up and carefully climbed it, conscious of the instability in his lower back, holding a putty knife between his teeth and the spackling in one hand.

“—What the fuck are you doing?” Rush said, breaking off from whatever point he’d been in the process of making about loom-weaving in 19th-century England and how it related to Garth Brooks.

Young removed the putty knife from his mouth. “What does it look like?”

“It looks like you’re an idiot in a back brace who’s about to break his fucking neck.”

Young made a noncommittal sound and squeezed some spackling onto the knife. He reached up and dabbed at the ceiling. The crack was hair-thin; he probably could’ve just painted over it. But he made sure it was filled in anyway, and then scraped with the knife until the spackling was smooth and almost invisible.

“I might have to paint over it anyway,” he mused, without really having meant to say it out loud.

Rush was standing and watching him with an unreadable expression, still clutching a single battered CD case.

Young descended the ladder just as carefully as he’d gone up it, gripping the metal sides. When he was back on the ground, he squinted up at his work consideringly. His hips did hurt from the irregular exertion, but not a lot, not more than he could stand.

“I never did much housework,” he said. “I was always gone. Africa, or the Balkans, or offworld. Mitchell’s the one who thought I ought to have hardware stuff. But it looks okay to me, I guess. What do you think?”

Rush’s mouth worked. “It’s your flat,” he said finally. “Why should I give a fuck one way or another?”

“It’s my _apartment_ ,” Young corrected. “Jesus Christ, haven’t you been living in the U.S. for like fifteen years or something?”

“I fail to see your point.”

“I’m just asking for your opinion on my DIY home repair job.”

Rush looked up at the ceiling. There was a weird tension to his body, like the only thing keeping him standing was that his muscles had locked in spasm. “Shoddy,” he said. “As I suspect you know. But I suppose we’ll manage. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I was about to have a shower.”

He stalked forward and pushed past Young, still holding the CD case, for some reason. Young heard the bathroom door slam a moment later.

Young sighed and rubbed his unruly hair, then glanced back up overhead. He couldn’t see the crack, only the damp off-white patch of the spackle. He tried not to see other things in it: the shell-like shape of a tel’tak, or the sign of one of the Lucian Alliance’s houses, or the uneven scars that David wore cut into his skin. Had worn?

He would paint over the spackle when he had a chance. It was just a ceiling. And, like Rush had said, they would manage.

“We have to,” he whispered, and then, his back aching, folded up the aluminum ladder, the spackle, the little flat-bladed knife to stow it all away again.


	10. Chapter 10

Rush tilted his head and regarded himself in the mirror.

It had this quality in common with all mirrors: that it did not do what it was supposed to, or rather what it was _popularly_ supposed to do; people saw a simple loop between body and reflection, between self and other, between the sheet of silvered glass and the entity who reached out to touch it, tracing the jagged line of a single crack— which was why this mirror even more than others did not do what it was supposed to. It was fissured now— its fracture planes made visible by their, well, fracture— and the contract under which it pretended to show a neatly outlined, bounded image of the body was suddenly under question. How had this image been created? one had to ask. Why was it warped slightly at the edges, where the glass had come apart under Young’s fist? The whole fragile ecosystem of photons, fractionally absorbed or not, electrons vibrating or drifting in an infinite sea, perhaps, particles starting to become each other or stopping, the human eye reduced to the level of nothingness, or nothing, anyway, that we would think of as human… That was what one was forced think about. I am not this image, one realised; I am creating this image; _we_ are, me and the air and the lightbulb, me and the sheet of silvered glass, and Young’s fist, and so in this sense it was most accurate not to say that it was _broken_ , but rather—

“Rush!” Young called.

Rush flinched.

The mirror was once more only a broken mirror, with two pieces missing from amongst its spiderweb of cracks.

He threw a resentful look over his shoulder. _“Yes?”_

“Come on! We’re gonna be late!”

“I don’t give a fuck,” Rush said under his breath, and looked down at his shirt.

It was, somewhat unusually these days, _his_ shirt; the previous morning, he had at last been permitted to enter his apartment and collect some of his belongings, on the condition that Young stand guard just out in the hallway. _Do you expect the Lucian Alliance to have concealed themselves in a box?_ Rush had enquired. _Perhaps they’ll jump out at me and shout_ Surprise! _That would certainly give me a shock. Or perhaps they’re hiding under the bed. They do have a reputation as bogeymen to uphold._

Young, who was unaware that Rush did not own a bed, had rolled his eyes. _Yeah, yeah,_ he’d said. _Whatever. Let’s go. I’m sick of you borrowing my shirts._

So Rush was wearing his own shirt now, plain and white and slightly creased from having been folded. He tried ineffectually to smooth out some of the creases. He was not used to looking in a mirror, or at least to giving conscious thought to what he found there. He had cut his hair with a pair of kitchen scissors some three or four months back, but when he shaved, which he did whenever he happened to remember, he was generally thinking about Ancient numeral systems (of which there were two, base ten and base eight) or stellar drift, or the concept of zero. He did not, as a rule, consider how other people might see him, because he was no longer accustomed to allowing other people much time in his head.

But he had a fucking _meeting_ today, apparently, because someone in the Stargate program had decided that he was now involved in the computer game project that they’d tried to keep from him, or that his input ought at least to be elicited before the Lucian Alliance tortured him into doing their homework and then cut off his head, or whatever it was they planned on doing with him, which Young had not wanted to disclose, but clearly had a good idea of.

Young had said that they used knives, and something called a pain stick. No. That they _had_ used those. On him.

Presumably the same tools were being used on David, if there was still a David, and not a smear of red matter newly added to the heliosphere.

Rush kept thinking of the time he’d played the piano for David, in the music room of the Berkeley house. He had not had any confidence in David’s musical literacy, and the conventional choice might have been something like the Moonlight Sonata, so he had been tempted to play Ligeti instead, because that was his primary instinct: if they might think you want their approval, do the one thing that will demonstrate your indifference to it; if you know what they want, then never, never give it to them, because to desire is to surrender the battle, and to be desired is to have the upper hand.

In the end, he’d played John Field’s second nocturne, which was formally tame, but which David would not have heard of. In fact he’d thought that David might be bored by it, and had looked forward to this vindictive confirmation of the intellectual superiority that he certainly knew better by now than to not expect. But when he’d looked at David during a long pause, his hands still arched above the keyboard, David’s face had been with vivid with pleasure. And when Rush had finished, the last C minor chord going from melancholy to nothing, David had said, _You’re really very gifted, aren’t you? I guess maybe some things you have to be born with._

It was hard to know, sometimes, what David was or wasn’t thinking, what he did or didn’t understand. But that too was an art, or a kind of intelligence.

“ _Rush!_ ” Young yelled, and hammered on the door. “I’m leaving you here in about five seconds!”

Rush flung the door open and stared at him icily. “Unlikely,” he said. “I’m surprised you haven’t attempted to affix a leash to me while I’m asleep.”

Young’s mouth hitched wryly. “Yeah, I figured that probably wouldn’t work.”

Young was clad in dress blues, looking square-shouldered and oddly cut-off-at-the-edges, as though someone had trapped him beneath a biscuit cutter and trimmed off all the parts that didn’t fit. He possessed a large array of ribbons that Rush didn’t understand the point, or indeed appreciate the aesthetics, of.

Young too had a meeting to go to. Rush suspected, but had not been able to confirm, that it was about him.

“You clean up nice,” Young said as Rush pushed past him in the hallway.

“Fuck off.”

“You ready to go?”

“They think,” Rush said, by way of response, “that they can _pacify_ me by pretending to ask for my fucking opinion, as though this will cause me to very meekly and nicely pretend that we’re not all sitting around waiting for my inevitable abduction. This whole meeting is ludicrous. Farcical. The only reason I’m participating is that it offers the possibility of escaping from your hellish, _Men’s Health_ _Magazine_ spread of an apartment, at least for a single, desultory afternoon.”

Young raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Okay,” he said. “So, yeah, I’m going to take that to mean you’re ready.”

* * *

Young drove them to the Mountain in his hulking monstrosity of an automobile, an abominably glossy and oversized pick-up truck that might have been useful on an industrial farm, but in no other location. It occupied an unnatural proportion of the road and made Rush feel carsick, though he would’ve felt sick anyway, given Young’s line of questions-that-were-not-questions, which, representatively and unpropitiously began, “You’re gonna behave yourself in this meeting, right?”

“I don’t know; am I a _dog?_ ” Rush sank down in his seat and twisted his head to stare out the window.

The approach of autumn had lessened the intensity of the light. Colorado appeared no more attractive on this account, though it was not as intolerably hot as it had been.

“I’m just saying,” Young said.

“Then _just say_ what you fucking mean.”

“Just—“ Young lifted a hand from the steering wheel and made an uncommunicative gesture. “Don’t do anything crazy.”

“Why would you anticipate that this might be a problem.”

Young threw him an incredulous glance.

Rush folded his arms tightly across his chest. “Am I in the _habit_ of doing things that merit the descriptor _crazy?_ ”

Young appeared to be exhibiting the first signs of a headache. He said, “I’m gonna assume you know the answer to that is _yes_.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“You’re incorrect.”

“Hotshot, I am, like, one thousand percent correct on this one.”

“Mathematically impossible.” Rush sank even lower in his seat, propping his feet up on the dash.

Young sighed. “Can you just _try_ not to— you know— do anything that would give someone an excuse to—“

Rush didn’t like the direction in which this was going. He set his jaw and stared fixedly at the passing landscape of strip malls, digging his fingers into the flesh of his upper arms. “An excuse to what?” he said, keeping his voice perfectly flat.

“I don’t know.”

“Clearly you do.”

Young sighed again and scrubbed at his hair, which was attempting to escape the military biscuit-cutter schema. “I mean, you realise you’re about two moves away from getting put someplace you’d find it a little harder to run away from. For your own good.”

There was a long pause, or possibly Rush’s subjective experience of time had glitched, because—

Rush said slowly, on an exhale and almost noiselessly, “For my own good.”

His eyes crept, without any conscious intent on his part, to the black plastic latch that would force the passenger-side door open. He imagined tumbling out while the truck was moving, hitting the tarmac in a badly controlled skid, the skin of his palms burning as he raked for purchase, his absurdly carapace-less and disorientatable body kicking at its ponderous vestibular system till he could get up and run, run, _run_.

But they had put a chip in him. Two chips. He could feel them under the skin, now, if he searched. And it would take a knife at the very least to cut them out.

“The only reason they don’t—“ Young began, and then frowned, squinting at the road ahead of them in a way that suggested deep thought, as unlikely a behavior though this was for Young.

Rush forced himself to fractionally relax.

The chips were there, two thin and unfamiliar ridges under his thumb.

“—Look,” Young said at last, “this is above your security clearance, technically, but given your whole situation, I feel like it’s something you ought to know. Maybe, I mean, for all I know, David told you already; he’s not really the kind of guy who goes by the book.”

When Young spoke about David, the lines at the corners of his eyes tightened. Rush didn’t like it; resented it, without knowing why.

“No,” he said, when it appeared that Young wanted a response.

“The Lucian Alliance has a mole in the SGC. We don’t know who, yet, but based on what we do know they’ve been up to… it’s someone high up. Someone in command.”

Rush absorbed this information without permitting himself a visible reaction. “David didn’t tell me.”

“The only reason you’re not in a bunker somewhere, or under the Mountain, with two armed guards assigned to you around the clock, is that command figures it’s _marginally_ less safe than letting you out in the open. So far.”

“They want to put me in a fucking bunker,” Rush said, neither phrasing the sentence particularly as a question nor allowing it to become a wondering observation, a statement that might accrete truth. 

His fingertips felt oddly cold, as they were prone to do at times of intense emotion, or rather at times that, objectively observed, ought to be characterised by intense emotion but were not, or not particularly. He felt, in fact, quite calm and remote. He was not thinking of anything in particular, though of course the problem inherent in forming such a declaration was that one did immediately begin to reflect upon all the things of which one was not thinking, pink elephants and the like, but also closets where the floor crunched with the remnants of a lightbulb, stairwells lit by flickering light the colour of dead skin, his futile fingernails scrabbling against the wall for purchase, the crunch of metacarpals because he had not yet learned how to form an architecturally optimal fist, the fracture planes of—

“Stop the car,” he said.

Young glanced at him. “What the fuck?”

“I’m getting out.”

“I’m giving you classified information, here,” Young said incredulously. “What do you mean, you’re getting out? I’m trying to help!”

“Stop the car,” Rush repeated levelly. “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

“It’s a mile and a fucking half to the Mountain, and you’re wearing a blazer. Don’t be stupid.”

“I’ll hitchhike.”

“You’re not hitchhiking.”

With sudden fury, Rush lashed out against the dashboard with a boot, leaving a perfect white imprint where the kick had landed.

“What the _fuck!”_ Young’s hand smacked against the steering wheel. The car lurched onto gravel. Young turned and glared.

Rush unfastened his seatbelt and tried to open the door, then fumbled with its locking mechanism, because it was locked. It was locked. Of course it was.

His heart was beating very rapidly.

He didn’t know why it had become necessary to immediately remove himself from the truck, but he was sure that his behavior must have a rational explanation. It usually, indeed almost invariably, did.

Young had done something to the lock, he thought, because he could not apprehend how to make it open. His futile fingernails were scrabbling against it. His palm was sweating, and that was almost certainly because—

He jerked back, because Young had laid a hand on his wrist.

The hand didn’t do anything. It didn’t even attempt to restrain Rush, which was absurd, because what else did Young think he could achieve with his appalling farmworker hand, the nails of which were slightly bitten, the skin of which was badly cared for: a broad, rough, gun-handing, rugby-player hand that would never be mistaken as anything but plebeian, a hand that was meant for holding people prisoner, and Rush’s mouth twisted in contempt, because Young couldn’t even pull that off properly; he couldn’t even keep Rush in a fucking _moving vehicle_ , although the vehicle was, Rush became slowly aware, no longer, strictly speaking, moving; Young had pulled off onto the shoulder of the road and traffic was rushing, in velocitous little pushes, past.

Warily, he kept his hand on the locking mechanism, but waited to understand Young’s intentions.

Young said, “I’m not gonna let them put you in a bunker.”

“What the fuck do _you_ care about it?” Rush threw at him— too fast.

He heard Young sigh. The hand shifted, but was not withdrawn.

“Just— put your seatbelt back on, would you, hotshot?” Young said, sounding tired.

“What are you planning to do if I don’t— duct tape me to the arm rests?”

“No, but you’re gonna be late to your meeting.”

Rush clenched his hands into fists and then allowed them to release.

Architecturally optimal structures.

And repeat.

He considered striking the passenger-side window until it gave way.

He had always wanted to put his hand through a window, and he did not play the piano any longer, which was one more reason it was good that he did not play the piano any longer, because that had been what had heretofore stopped him from putting his hand through a window, at least in part, and the other factor had also been— removed.

But it would be difficult to type if he put his hand through the window, and quite probably Young would consider it an example of _anything that would give someone an excuse to_.

He remembered David saying, _If I told Jackson about that place, you’d be under a psych hold._

But David was dead, or else the Lucian Alliance was torturing him, as they had also tortured Young, who sat here now sad-faced and wrecked and stupid, a man who mistook mirrors for windows and put his hand through _them_ , as though he did not understand the exercise’s purpose, anymore than he apparently understood the purpose of putting his hand on the wrist of someone about to jump from a moving car.

The desire to jump from a moving car had left him. His fingertips were not cold any longer. He let his shoulders slump.

“We good?” Young asked. He had not removed his hand yet.

“Don’t call me ‘hotshot,’” Rush said after a moment, not looking at him.

* * *

Meetings at the Mountain always felt underground, which they were, technically, but they felt even moreso than they should, and the meeting to which Rush had been summarily abandoned by Young promised to be, in particular, exquisitely claustrophobic. The chairs were gunmetal grey and the walls were concrete. Half of the people seated around the conference table were biscuit-cuttered to neatness, held upright by the starch in their Air Force suits, and the others were prim bureaucrats, lukewarm-watered down to perfection: an old man who smacked of government bloat and nouveau riche pretensions, his interchangeable aides-de-camp, and a silly porcelain-doll-looking girl. The only exception was a strikingly beautiful woman in a motorised wheelchair who darted an amused look at Rush as he came in.

“Amanda Perry,” she whispered as he sat beside her. “You can call me Mandy.”

Which was enough to nearly make him flinch, as he took in the limp limbs that spoke of quadriplegia, and remembered their conversation. Fucking Speech to Text. She ought to have said something. Why ought she to have said something? No particular reason. He considered and rejected the impulse to apologise.

“Nicholas Rush,” he said. “But you know that already.”

“Well, you look like a guy who doesn’t get out much.”

Automatically, he jerked his gaze downward, inspecting his slightly ill-fitting blazer— he’d lost weight since he’d bought it, when he still lived in San Francisco— and the wrinkled front of his shirt, before he realised that she was laughing almost soundlessly at him.

“Yes, all right,” he said, sourly. “I’d like to see how smart _you_ look when the Lucian Alliance is trying to abduct _you_.”

This served to remind him of the anger he was feeling, just as one of the blue biscuits sitting around the table stood and said, “Gentlemen. And, uh— ladies. Thanks for joining us. Unfortunately, Colonel Telford is unable to be here today; I’m Lieutenant Matthew Scott, and in Colonel Telford’s absence, General Landry asked me to represent the military wing of the Icarus Project partnership.”

Rush loathed the word _partnership._

 _Partnership_ , he thought. When they wanted to lock him in a bunker.

When they were going to let the Lucian Alliance have him.

When they were going to lock him in a bunker or let the Lucian Alliance have him, because he was not their fucking partner; he was a very specialised tool, which he did not _mind_ , in fact he _preferred_ to be a tool because he was not a partner; he was not anyone’s _partner_ , and that was what David had understood. It was the sheer unprofessionalism to which he objected, not the element of personal danger.

He did not like badly designed endeavours, and he did not like people lying to him.

“On the civilian side,” the biscuit continued, “we’re very honored to have Senator Armstrong with us. Senator Armstrong, of course, is overseeing the funding not only for the Icarus Project, but more specifically for the Astria Porta initiative that we’re here to discuss. Uh, for Dr. Rush’s benefit, that’s what we’re calling the computer game. The computer game expansion pack. Senator Armstrong, this is Dr. Nicholas Rush, who’s agreed to participate in developing the Astria Porta initiative.”

Rush said shortly, “I’ve agreed to no such thing.”

That got the biscuit’s attention. He paused, looking worried. “I’m sorry. I must have misunderstood. General Landry said—“

“General Landry,” Rush said, emphasizing each syllable with a tone of disdain that it had taken him decades to perfect, “invited me to be a part of your little pet project only as a last-ditch measure, after the existence of said project was revealed to me by a source who quite reasonably assumed that it would be _ludicrous_ to consider launching any project concerning the stargate cyphers without my participation, particularly a project that seeks to render them as some sort of _recreational puzzle_ within a video game that depends upon both computational principles and code that are fundamentally incompatible with the language of the cyphers themselves, as such a plan is not only mathematically absurd but also wholly, entirely, and without question dependent upon a level of familiarity with _my work_ that no one within Stargate Command possesses— which is why, incidentally, this project was launched in the first place, and why an attempt was made to _conceal_ it from me, as, presumably, Stargate Command wished to prevent me from arriving at the realization that it was preemptively searching for my replacement, having accepted as unpreventable a scenario in which I am kidnapped by the Lucian Alliance, who will then proceed to torture me until, I assume, I solve the cyphers on _their_ terms and assist them in dialing the nine-chevron address, an eventuality that Stargate Command is eager to avert, though not so eager, it must be noted, that they’re willing to _prevent me from getting tortured in the first fucking place_ , for instance by addressing the fact that they have a high-level Lucian Alliance _mole_ in their organization, or, in fact—“

The biscuit was trying to interrupt.

“— _in fact_ ,” Rush continued, undeterred, and possibly at a faintly hysterical pitch, “by asking me to participate in their _idiotic, futile,_ fucking _laughable_ little project, when the _only_ hope of rendering it even _slightly_ less than _completely implausible_ is to solicit _my input_ for it, and instead opting to treat me as some form of mentally unstable _child_ to whom the truth had best not be entrusted, though incredibly sophisticated alien codes governing the manipulation of spacetime apparently pose no problem at all!”

There was a silence.

Rush was breathing fast.

He realised that he had clenched his hands into fists, and that Perry was very determinedly not looking at him.

“Well,” the biscuit said. He appeared to be wishing that he were not in the room. “Now that Dr. Rush has revealed classified information to our civilian visitors, I guess this meeting is officially called to order. Guys, please don’t leave without signing one of the forms that we’re going to hand out to you. Let’s just try to— uh— move away from some of the more emotional topics, maybe, and talk about—“

“I’m sorry,” the porcelain-doll-looking girl said.

Senator Armstrong said repressively, almost before she’d done speaking, “Chloe—”

The girl jerked slightly away from him. She had very long hair, as straight as though she had ironed it. “No; it’s okay. It’s—“ She took a deep breath and looked at Rush levelly. “It was my idea. My initiative. And you should’ve been told.”

Rush inspected her. She appeared to be perhaps twenty years old, and had a peach scarf tied about her neck above a collared white blouse. He had thought she was an intern. She looked the part: a little girl playing at dress-up in the too-serious and not-quite-fitting costume that she would be forced to wear as a part of some future career. “ _Your_ initiative?” he said.

“What my aide means to say—“ the senator began.

“We needed a contingency plan,” the girl said. She looked pale, but very determined. “Maybe you don’t know how much time and money my— Senator Armstrong has put into the Icarus Project. Maybe you don’t know how important it is. _Millions_ of dollars, thousands of people, locating a— a— an appropriate planet, designing an _interstellar mission_ , because we can’t afford _not_ to. And then there’s you, right in the middle.”

“Me,” Rush repeated, faintly mocking. “Little old me. I’m flattered.”

The girl pressed her lips together. “Yes. You. A human being— that’s the resource that ought to make people nervous. You can control a naquadria shipment. A stargate stays where you put it. A hyperdrive isn’t just going to _stop working._ But you— you’re too complicated a system to control for. It’s not just the Lucian Alliance. There are a thousand ways you could die.”

“How reassuring to hear.”

“It isn’t _about_ you,” she said loudly.

“ _Chloe_ ,” the senator said, more firmly.

She ducked her head, her hair falling in her face. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

A brief, uncomfortable silence fell.

“Okay,” the biscuit-soldier said, with obvious effort. “Maybe we should just start out by acknowledging that— uh— some miscommunications have occurred. Regardless, I think the important thing is for us to focus on the future of the initiative, which means setting aside those miscommunications and—“

Rush pushed his chair back from the table abruptly. The air inside the room seemed thin, and a headache was pressing against his temples like a vise or, more probably, the effect of a tightly sealed container holding him in, as though he were a superheated gas, a state-changing substance, excited particles that wanted to escape and _not be him_ _anymore._

“If it’s not _about me_ ,” he said, “then you shouldn’t find it too difficult to continue without my input. As that was, apparently, your initial plan. Good luck with that.”

He picked up his briefcase, turned, and exercised considerable force of will in exiting rather than storming out of the room.

* * *

In the corridor he leaned against a stone wall and breathed for a moment with his eyes closed.

He agreed with the girl. Of course he did.

It was simply a question of— resource allocation.

He didn’t even object to the initiative as such.

He approved of contingency planning.

 _Partnership_ was a euphemism for parasitic relations.

He was no one’s partner.

But they should not have lied to him.

He agreed with her. It wasn’t about him. He was only a resource.

It was such an _inelegant solution._ That was the source of his objection.

His personal feelings were not at issue.

But they should not have lied to him.

He did not know how long he stood there before a timid voice said, “Dr. Rush?”

He opened his eyes.

It was the girl. She was standing in front of him, or not quite in front of him, slightly to the side and at what she must have thought was an appropriately respectful distance for a resource. Her peach scarf was askew and she was biting her lip.

He looked at her without speaking.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You’ve already said that.”

“I didn’t mean— I shouldn’t have said— of course it’s about you.”

“You were right,” Rush said.

“No.” She shook her head vehemently, sending her hair wobbling. “I knew about the Lucian Alliance, but I didn’t really _realise_ ; I didn’t think about you like you were someone who had to walk around knowing that he might get tortured. I didn’t think about how it would feel.”

Rush said flatly, “You shouldn’t. Sentiment will only compromise your decisions.”

“You can’t really believe that.”

“Of course I can. I do.” He turned his head away tiredly, wanting the conversation to be over.

“My name is Chloe Armstrong,” she said.

He had supposed as much. “How interesting for you,” he said.

“It _is_ my initiative. I work in my father’s office. He thought— I know about video games, you see, and the idea started out small, but then no one else had any better ones, and suddenly I was in charge of the whole project, because _someone_ needed to take charge, and everyone in the Air Force is—“

“Miss Armstrong,” Rush said, “please do me the favor of discharging your point.”

She faltered, then reached into her small purse and produced a business card and a pen. “Just— I _do_ want your input. I need it. And if _you_ need anything, I owe to you to try to—“

Rush said, “You don’t.”

She was writing something on the back of the card, in very small, neat block letters. When she had finished, she thrust the card out at him. “Still,” she said.

He took it ungraciously and, without looking at it, shoved it into his pocket. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t feel a great deal of sympathy for your initiative’s needs at the moment.”

“Yes. But—“ She studied him. “We all want the same thing, don’t we?”

“Do we?”

“To break the codes. To dial the ninth chevron.”

Rush felt his hands close into fists. The unconscious impulse, like an autonomic reflex, had dogged him all day; he did not know why he felt such an urge to fight, a defensive instinct. “Yes,” he said. “We all want that. Of course we do. Yes.”

* * *

Once he had rid himself of Armstrong Minor, Rush abandoned the twenty-fourth floor altogether and made his way towards the twenty-first floor infirmary. He had been there once before, when he’d first moved to Colorado. The Stargate Program mandated a large number of medical tests upon which employment was contingent.

It looked much the same now as it had done then, which was to say military in every detail of its design and furnishings. He had thought, the first time, that it might look like— might smell like— he had dreaded— But in fact it had looked like a room meant to be in the midst of a war zone, with long neat rows of white-sheeted beds, and the air had not had the taint of sickness on it.

A blonde woman, rather soft-faced, was filling out a chart as he entered. She looked up at the sound of his footsteps. “Can I help you?” she said.

“I’d like to review my medical records,” Rush said. “My name is Dr. Nicholas Rush.”

“Sure thing,” the blonde woman said. Her smile had no hint of artifice in it. “Let me go pull a hard copy for you. Won’t be a minute.”

She disappeared through a door marked MEDICAL STAFF ONLY.

Rush folded his arms across his chest.

He had not been certain that he wished to take this step, if for no other reason than because he had been instructed to do so, which always made him bridle, and because as a rule he did not like secrecy. He did not like secrecy: that was, after all, the cryptanalyst’s dominant characteristic, a obsessive insistence that nothing ought to remain hidden. So he did not care for this sneaking-around, this cut-rate Le Carré bullshit; in the cryptographic field, he was known for the brutality of his programs, though at the same time for their elegance. A thing could be elegant and brutal all at once, in his experience, and it was what he aspired to. He had no time for civilised fucking English-style games of circumlocution. You could anatomise the thing after it was dead.

(Even with its crisply military scent, this was the wrong room in which to think of death.)

But: he did not like secrecy, so he was here. As Jackson— and he was absolutely certain it was Jackson, the author of that coy, pretentious little riddle– had undoubtedly known he would be.

Wheels within fucking hamster wheels.

He resisted the urge to press his hands to his temples.

The door at the back of the room swung open, and the blonde woman, with a look of bemusement, emerged in the company of Carolyn Lam. Lam was the base’s Chief Medical Officer, whom Rush had met when he had been here… whenever it was that he had been here before. (The dates had been rather vague at the time and not become significant less vague in the months since then). She was hardly to be troubled for a routine documentation request, which made the fact that she was holding a file folder, and the blonde woman wasn’t, rather interesting.

“Dr. Rush,” Lam said. “Lieutenant Johansen tells me that you’ve asked to review your medical file. Can I ask why?”

It was a tone of voice to which Rush was programmed to respond by bristling: a smooth, practiced, passive, and perfectly bureaucratic tone that hinted at but did not outright accuse of wrongdoing. It was the voice of the job centre advisor, and of the college porter who stopped you crossing the quad on your way in, wanting to see identification for _No particular reason, sir_ , _only protocol._

“No particular reason,” Rush said, with a sharp slice of a smile. “I wasn’t aware I needed one.”

“You don’t,” Lam said. But she hadn’t handed the file over. “If there’s a question I can help you with—“

“There isn’t.” Rush extended his hand. “I’d simply like to look at the file. Please.”

Lam didn’t move. She was wearing a complicated expression.

“Please,” Rush repeated, with more force behind the word.

At last, and haltingly, Lam placed the file in his hand. “You’ll have to read it here,” she said. “I can’t allow you to remove it from the infirmary.”

“That should be more than adequate,” Rush said.

The file was not thick.

He did not bother to sit, but simply turned and laid the folder out on one of the crisp white army-sheeted gurneys. He could discern according to a certain hyperawareness of motion that neither Lam nor the other woman— Johansen— had left the room. Quite probably they were watching him. But he was used to being watched, by this point.

 _RUSH,_ the file read. _NICHOLAS. DOB: 11/01/65. HEIGHT: 66’’. WEIGHT: 125 lbs._

He scanned through the cover sheet: _FAMILY HISTORY: Unknown._ Yes, well. Close enough. _SOCIAL HISTORY: Patient originally from UK, moved to US 13 yrs ago. Reports wife recently deceased. He lives alone. Current tobacco user, pack/day 28 yrs. Heavy caffeine use. Social drinker._ Underneath that, _PAST MEDICAL HISTORY: nb uncooperative source._ Wasn’t he just. _Records requested: 1970 concussion, 1974 surgery re: fx radius/ulna, 1974 adm no details, 1975 lac sutures + X-ray, 1977 fx metacarpals III/IV. Hx headache._

Too quickly and with an audible sound, Rush turned the paper over. On the back was a long list of physical findings— _T 97.6 HR 75 BP 114/96—_ and a review of systems that he skimmed through. _Constitutional: denies anorexia or weight loss… Respiratory: denies cough or wheezing… Psychiatric: denies depression, anxiety, mental disturbance, suicidal ideation…_

The next page contained a _PLAN: Patient is cleared for medical duty. Patient is known ATA/ATS POS — Gene expression levels by qPCR ordered. Whole exon sequencing ordered. Flow cytometric analysis ordered. Consult Beckett._

This did not mean anything to him. He flipped through the remaining pages of the file, which assured the reader that his MRI was _GOA’ULD NEGATIVE,_ his CT scan was _NEGATIVE FOR ABNORMALITIES_ , and his EEG was _HIGH AMPLITUDE/HIGH FREQUENCY ATA BAND._ Following this last result was a page containing a genetic sequence: _ATA SEQUENCING._ Then another: _ATS SEQUENCING._ Then a third: _UAT SEQUENCING._ He could make no sense of them, and was faintly troubled by the fact that their segments of letters looked like what they were: code.

 _Interpretation of results,_ the next page read. _Excellent quality sample obtained from the NMDP.  Patient is a homozygote for the ATA gene and ATS genes.  He is a hemizygote for the UAT gene. Given homozygosity, ATA and ATS expression levels are predicted to be extremely high. Recommend further study of UAT, including whole genome sequencing and alignment to all Ancient tissue samples on file. Recommend sequencing of family members if genetic material or individuals can be located. Recommend comparison to other carriers of ATA, specifically CaBe (geographically suggestive) and JoSh (only other individual with two copies of ATS) to assess for any commonalities in ancestry. Recommend in-field testing of patient’s ability to operate Ancient tech._

He could still feel Lam watching him.

Next page: more impenetrable data, some of it circled and marked with an exclamation point. The interpretation of results: _ATA mRNA levels equivalent to those of JoSh. Possible physiologic ceiling. ATS levels equivalent to JoSh as predicted. UAT may explain high amplitude EEG waves not observed in JoSh._

He did not know who fucking JoSh was.

He did not know why anyone would be so interested in his genes.

His grandparents had been quasi-literate at best, working in the shipyards and raising children. Farther back than that the family disappeared in coal. Not an ancestor was there, so far as he knew, who could so much as sign his own name, and so their names had gone unwritten, unremembered, and good riddance: let them all be erased.

His genes were the genes of half Scotland, surely, half-drink and half-slurry, kept alive half by the dole and half by the animal refusal to die.

The last document in the file was a hard copy of an email dated _June 12, 2008,_ and sent from someone called Carson Beckett at an address that indicated Atlantis.

 _Dear Dr. Lam_ , it began.

_Thank you for involving me in the care of your patient, Nicholas Rush. I have reviewed the records and tissue-typing results that you sent via the Midway Station secure FTP package. I was able to confirm protein expression equivalent to the highest levels that we have on file for both ATA and ATS. As noted, this is suggestive of a physiologic ceiling seen in those who carry two copies of each gene. I was also able to subject cultured cells to EM radiation that corresponds to that used by Ancient technology and found that the electrophysiological responses of NiRu cells were equivalent to JoSh cells._

_I have gone back over the records of all ATA carriers and homozygotes, and can find no other instances of UAT.  As the gene is X-linked, I would be quite interested in obtaining samples from the patient’s mother if possible, as well as any siblings. I understand the patient has indicated that all relatives are estranged or deceased, but I would remind you that there may be tissue samples available that could be used. I understand also that there is some concern regarding information security at the SGC at the moment, so I defer to your decision about the timing of gathering as complete of a family history as possible, but maintain that it should be gathered._

_To date, I have isolated the UAT gene and purified the UAT protein. There are some indications that the intron spanning exons 6 and 7 may encode a microRNA that could end up being a more important target than the protein itself. As of yet, I have not determined its function, despite observing the same response in proximity to Ancient technology that you yourself recount, and I suspect that it will be quite difficult to do so without access to—_

Rush broke off reading at the sound of a casual rat-tat-tat knocking. He looked up and saw the other colonel, the forgettable one, what was his name, Mitchell, slouching casually against the frame of the infirmary door.

Mitchell saw him at the same moment, and his face went from its ordinary expression of nothing-in-particular to creased around the edges and tense. “Dr. Rush,” he said. “Funny seeing you here.”

“Dr. Rush asked to review his medical file,” Lam said, stepping into the centre of the room, her voice very precise and very neutral.

“That seems like a security violation,” Mitchell said.

Lam said, “Patient medical records are subject to privacy regulations, and considered the property of the individual.”

“Are they,” Mitchell said.

He and Lam were participating in a dense, silent, and all-but-invisible interlocution that seemed far more information-rich than the one in which they were nominally engaged.

Rush looked from one to the other, his hand clenched at the edge of the file folder. Without meaning to, he had snapped it shut, trapping the rows and rows of genetic lettering within. He felt that he could feel them under his fingertips, a cyphertext that was not cyphertext exactly, a code that called out to be broken and that he did not know how to break.

“Why wasn’t I told?” he asked, directing the question at neither Lam or Mitchell in particular, but at the room as a whole: its grey gunmetal aesthetic, its military bedsheets, its sterile smell. “About these genes, this— _this_ gene, whatever this is?”

“There was no reason for you to know,” Mitchell said.

“It’s _my fucking body!_ ” Rush’s voice came out too loud.

He had been trying to appear calm. He _was_ calm.

Lam said quietly, “There are no medical effects that we’re aware of. You could have gone your whole life not knowing.”

“Bullshit,” Rush said, pointing a not-entirely-steady finger at her. “ _Bullshit._ You wouldn’t be interested if it did nothing; you wouldn’t have sent my _cells_ to _Atlantis_ ; you wouldn’t be talking about tracking down my _family_ , which— best of luck with that; you’ll have to scour half the council estates in Glasgow to turn the lot of them out from wherever they’re currently transmuting government benefits, alchemy-like, into Buckfast, if they haven’t managed to get themselves guttered on any given night—“

“We don’t know what it does,” Mitchell interrupted. His jaw was set hard. “We don’t know what it does, and frankly you should be _glad_ we don’t, at this point, because, if _we_ don’t, then it means that the Lucian Alliance doesn’t, which is why we didn’t _tell_ you about any of this— because as far as we know, the Lucians only know about the first two genes, and we’re trying our goddamn best to keep it that way, so obviously—“

Rush was already laughing soundlessly, a quick painful huff of breath that seemed to come from behind his lungs. “So obviously you wouldn’t tell _me,_ ” he said. “Since I’m due to be kidnapped any moment now, and I’d only give it up under torture.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Mitchell said, with an un-earned and over-earnest certainty.

“Oh, fuck you,” Rush said, and hurled the file across the infirmary. It struck the floor and fell open, sending papers spilling out. “So sorry to fuck your infosec with my impending torture. You can keep the file; I’m leaving.”

He started towards the door and saw Mitchell move to block his path. He did not know what Mitchell planned; perhaps this was the bunker moment of which Young had attempted to warn him, and if in fact that was the case, then he had very few avenues of action. Or could Mitchell himself be an agent of the Lucian Alliance? Young had given him very little information about the supposed Lucian mole within Stargate Command. High-up, Young had said, and Mitchell fit that description.

Unless Young himself was the Lucian agent, and attempting to distract Rush from his own behavior. Surely no one would classify Young as “high-up.”

Perhaps there was no Lucian agent. Perhaps it had been a ploy to ensure his cooperation.

But what would be the logic in that?

He stared at Mitchell’s remarkably vacant blue eyes.

“Cam,” Lam said from behind him. “Don’t.”

“I’m trying to protect you,” Mitchell said to Rush.

“Yes,” Rush said. “I’m certain you think so.”

He had almost made it to the door when the slow wail of an alarm began to push its way from an unseen speaker, and a blue light pulsed a curiously undersea warning from its spot against the top of the world

“Unscheduled offworld activation,” a stiff voice announced over the base’s tannoy.

“ _Shit_ ,” Mitchell said, just as Rush said, “What—“

Mitchell’s hand came down at the top of Rush’s arm, fingers digging hard into the muscle.

“Get the fuck off me,” Rush bit out, trying to wrestle his way free of the grip, but distracted by the shrill, wavering pitch of the siren.

Mitchell shoved him in the direction of Lam. “Make sure he stays here,” he ordered her.

Lam nodded tersely, rather than telling Mitchell to fuck off, which was what Rush would have done, and what he was strongly considering doing despite the fact that Mitchell had released his arm. He objected to being manhandled. He was not a piece of _meat_ for infantile American fascists to manoeuvre into whatever corner they wanted him in; he would not be _moved_ and he would not be made to _take tests_ designed to assess his piece-of-meat potential; he would not allow them to skim slices off of him and send them to another galaxy to be stared at, and he wanted them _back_ , those cells that were his, that were _him_.

But Mitchell had departed before he could articulate this very reasonable set of sentiments, slamming the door shut behind him, and Rush was left only with the blue cycle of the light and the high-pitched alarm in his ears.

Lam touched his shoulder softly. “It’ll be fine,” she said. “We get false alarms all the time.”

Rush watched as she crossed the room and knelt to collect the pages of his medical file. He could make out the repeated letters of his genetic code for a moment, before Lam straightened the papers. C, A, D, G. C, D, A, G. His instinct was to convert it into trits, as though his body could be rendered in -1s, 0s, and 1s, which perhaps it could, perhaps it _should_ be, and then it would be possible to find a solution for it, possible to solve the problem that was the fact of being embodied.

As Lam stood, awkward in her low heels, he said. “I apologise for throwing the papers. That was unnecessary.”

She faced him, hugging the folder to her white-coated chest, her hair slipping loose from its sleep ponytail. She looked almost tearful for a moment, but then the look passed, like the shadow of a cloud over the face of the earth.

“Don’t. Please don’t apologise,” she said.


	11. Chapter 11

Young had parted ways with Rush in the elevator, feeling a certain amount of trepidation. It wasn’t so much that he was worried about something happening to Rush as he was worried about _Rush_ happening to Rush, especially after the whole scene in the truck. He’d been pretty sure that Rush was ready to toss himself into traffic just because, basically, he was keyed the hell up and Young had said the wrong thing. The trouble was that it was hard to know the _right_ thing to say to Rush; it was like the inside of Rush’s brain spoke a different language from the rest of the world, and Rush had to run everything he heard through about six different crappy translation websites to make it compute. You could just never predict what he was going to get out of what you were saying, and whether it was going to make him charge the military for a bunch of South African wines, or pass out, or throw a fork.

He didn’t want Rush to end up in a bunker.

He felt his way around that thought while he sat outside of Landry’s office, trying to ignore the persistent ache in his back and hip. Really, Rush in a bunker was a better idea all-around. Not only was it safer for Rush, but it would get him the hell out of Young’s apartment, where his principal occupation over the last four days had been being a pain in the ass. Young could start his _life_ , his new life, his _real_ life.

That had been the point of the move. No more Emily, and no more hospital purgatory, either; no more David ( _no more David_ , the darkness under the floorboards of his brain whispered, _now for good_ ); just him learning to live with the new self that had been sewn together on the operating table. But instead it had turned into, almost from the start, a bizarro European art-house comedy of the sort that Rush seemed to orchestrate without any effort. Unconscious mathematicians who cooked dinner in his beer cooler, Lucian Alliance snatch teams in his suburban apartment complex, Rush trying to put toothpaste on his ceiling, and kitchen machines that flash-froze fruit.

That wasn’t real life. He didn’t know what it was, exactly.

He lifted his eyes as the door to the office began to open, and stood as hastily as he was able to, moving to salute.

Landry wasn’t alone, which surprised him; when he’d gotten the call that the general wanted to meet with him, he’d assumed it was about Rush— some kind of formal request for Rush to stay with him till the latest Lucian catastrophe blew over. But standing behind Landry was Jack O’Neill, who didn’t show up at Cheyenne Mountain these days for anything that wasn’t pretty damn close to a Code Red, and there was someone else in the room: a civilian, a petite Asian woman who wore a severe look.

“Colonel,” Landry said, when salutes had been exchanged. “Come in. I’d like to introduce you to Camile Wray, from the International Oversight Advisory. She’s attached to the Icarus Project.”

Young shook Wray’s hand and then, at Landry’s nod, took a seat— a protracted moment of trying to make joints and tendons and muscles work in tandem, when they felt like a baby’s uncoordinated, flailing limbs. He was aware of Landry and O’Neill carefully not looking at him. Wray was, maybe out of plain curiosity. He didn’t know if they’d told her what had happened to him.

“So,” Landry said when Young was seated. “I want to make it clear from the beginning that this meeting is informal. I’m well aware you’re still on leave. Let’s not even call it a meeting. Think of it as a casual chat between four colleagues who share some similar interests.”

Young shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Yes, sir. And what interests would those be?”

“Well, Nicholas Rush, for one,” O’Neill said, at the same time that Landry said, “The Icarus Project.”

They glanced at each other, and then at Young.

“How is ol’ Nick?” O’Neill asked, leaning back in his chair. “I hear you two are roommates.”

“We’re—  _definitely_ not roommates,” Young said.

“Yeah?”

“He’s sleeping on my couch at the moment. For security reasons.”

“How’s _that_ going?” O’Neill lifted a querying eyebrow. “Cause I gotta say, when I met the guy, he didn’t really seem like roommate material.”

Young said guardedly, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“My impression was that the guy is nuttier than a can of peanut brittle.”

“He’s— a little stressed,” Young said lamely. “Listen, this isn’t about the credit card thing, is it?”

O’Neill and Landry exchanged another glance, this one baffled.

“What credit card thing?” O’Neill asked.

“He, uh—“ Young searched for a diplomatic way to explain that Rush had been in a bad mood that had resulted in the misuse of a sizable chunk of government funding. “Apparently he has very specific household needs. He might have used his SGC expense account to purchase some… objects.”

O’Neill looked fascinated. “What kind of objects?”

“Uh— “ Young felt himself flailing. “Some kind of something that freeze-dries anything you put in it, like astronaut ice cream, and another one that makes couscous? He’s kind of a chef.”

“A _chef_ ,” O’Neill said disbelievingly.

Landry said, “A _chef?_ ” A faint crease had appeared between his eyebrows.

“We _are_ talking about Nicholas Rush, right?” O’Neill asked. “Little guy, pretty much always angry? I would have bet you anything that he didn’t even eat. Just— absorbed the life force of people he pissed off, maybe.”

“He’s a lot of work,” Young allowed. “But he does make a pumpkin sorbet to die for.”

There was an incredulous silence.

“So you like him,” O’Neill said at last.

Young said, “I wouldn’t go _that_ far.”

“You think we could send him into the field?”

As tempting as it was to wince, or even let his jaw drop, Young resisted. “So this is about the DHD thing?”

It was not, apparently, about the DHD thing, either, because this question only resulted in more confusion. Young was getting tired of the rapid-fire exchange of complicated, meaningful nods and glances that he didn’t have the context to understand.

“It’s just that Rush said he was going to need to go offworld,” he said, to cut the glances short. “Something about the eighth cipher; he said he needed to do something to a DHD to solve it, and that it couldn’t be anyone else— it had to be him.”

“So _Rush_ is prepared to go into the field,” Landry said.

“Hank,” O’Neill said in a long-suffering tone, like they were re-hashing an old argument.

“ _Jack_ ,” Landry returned.

“ _Gentlemen_ ,” Camile Wray said. She had been silent so far, but leaned forward now, her hands precisely folded in her lap. “Colonel,” she said to Young, “what is your tactical assessment of Dr. Rush?”

“I mean—“ Young said, and faltered, looking uncertainly from her to O’Neill to Landry. “Maybe you should tell me what this _is_ about.”

“It’s about the Icarus Project,” Wray said. “We’ll get to that in a moment. Would you answer the question, please?”

Young still didn’t know what to say. He thought about it for a minute, staring at a small American flag that was stuck in a jar of pens on Landry’s desk. Rush would hate that, he thought, that flag; he’d probably say something about— Christ knew— the military equivalent of dollhouse furniture or something. He tried to imagine what Rush was doing. Hopefully managing to hold a well-mannered and reasonable discussion about video games, though the odds of that seemed astronomically low.

“I don’t think I can give you a tactical assessment,” he said finally. “In almost every way that counts, he’s just— kind of hard to predict. He’s not like other people. He doesn’t react like other people. It helps to imagine him like, I don’t know, Teal’c or somebody. Someone who grew up on another planet. Not like a human being.”

 _That_ caused a heavy silence to spread throughout the office, which made Young feel once more like he’d been left out of the discussion.

“So you wouldn’t send him into the field,” O’Neill said. His face was neutral.

“I think it would depend on who went with him,” Young said. “He needs— managing. A lot of managing. I wouldn’t rule it out completely, but I wouldn’t be looking to stick him on a gate team.”

No one said anything for a moment. Landry and O’Neill were looking at each other.

“Do I get to know what this is about now?” Young ventured, feeling a little bit like a schoolkid who’d been sitting in the principal’s office for ten minutes without having the nature of his crime divulged.

“How much do you actually _know_ about the Icarus Project?” Wray asked, sitting straight-backed, composed, and hard to parse.

“Not a ton, I guess.” Young tried to remember. “I know about the nine-chevron address we found, which no one knows anything about, including where it goes to, and which we can’t dial because Rush has to break all the codes first. And even if we _could_ dial, it would take so much energy to power the wormhole that we’d need a whole planet’s worth of naquadria to do it, which, since nobody’s stumbled across a planet like that so far, makes the whole thing theoretical at best. And—“ he paused, and hoped the pause was not perceptible to either general, “Colonel Telford is in charge of it. Or was, I guess. He was in charge.”

“He’s still in charge,” Landry said. “He’s got six hours left on his window.”

Until the SGC deactivated SG-3’s GDOs, he meant, and made it impossible for David and his team to ever come home.

“Right,” Young managed, even though his throat had closed.

O’Neill was gazing at him with an unreadable expression that made Young feel naked.

Wray said tightly, “The Icarus Project is a joint project with both civilian and military factions. Colonel Telford had— has— the full support of the IOA. In his absence—“

“In his absence,” O’Neill cut in smoothly, still watching Young, “how’d you like the job, Colonel?”

Young stared at him. “Ex— cuse me?” he said stupidly.

“The job,” O’Neill said, gesturing vaguely, as though the job were hovering around his head like a particularly persistent mosquito. “The command. Of the Icarus Project. Of the Icarus Base.”

“The Icarus _Base_?”

O’Neill snapped his fingers. “Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention. The whole theoretical part? Not so much. We found a planet. Put a gate down and everything. We’re already building the base. Should be done just about in time for Christmas. So: whaddya say?”

Landry was staring fixedly at his desk with an air of disapproval. But Wray met Young’s eyes when he turned to her for some kind of clarification, some way to make sense of what he was hearing. She didn’t look happy, but there was an element of curiosity to her also, something analytical in the way she tilted her head.

“I’m on medical leave,” Young said, when he could figure out to make his mouth work. “I’m not cleared for duty.”

O’Neill waved his hand lazily. “Eh, there’ll be a lot of sitting around. There always is with these command jobs. You can use a MALP.”

“Jack,” Landry said wearily.

“What? I’m mentoring him. I’m being a mentor.”

“What does any of this have to do with _Rush,_ though?” Young asked. “I mean, I get that he’s breaking the ciphers, and, sure, so maybe he has to take a quick trip offworld to do it, but that’s a desk job. He works on a _laptop_. You’re not going to send him halfway across the galaxy just so he can solve _math problems._ What about the Lucian Alliance?”

Now O’Neill was the one carefully not looking at Young, presumably to mask his disagreement with the answer that Young was about to get.

“It was the opinion of Colonel Telford,” Wray said in a very crisp, precise voice, “that dialing the nine-chevron address would be neither possible nor, ultimately, likely to achieve any military or scientific goals without the presence of Dr. Rush both at the Icarus Base and as part of any subsequent exploratory team.”

“You mean— as in, you wanted to send him through the gate,” Young said. “When you dialed the address.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

Wray was watching him with the same air of remote curiosity. “Is that your tactical assessment?”

“I already told you, I don’t—“ Young ran a hand over his face. He was trying to imagine Rush on some alien planet, probably shoeless, furious about the temperature or the color of the sky or the quality of the food, throwing a fit and threatening to blow up a temple or steal a spaceship or something, possibly right before falling over in a dead faint. “Christ. This is _David’s_ idea?”

“Colonel Telford and Dr. Rush had an excellent working relationship,” Wray said. “Excuse me. _Have_ an excellent working relationship. The IOA takes Colonel Telford’s recommendations on the matter very seriously. He was the one who recruited Dr. Rush in the first place, which earned him a considerable amount of favor.”

“David recruited _Rush?_ ” Young shook his head. “He doesn’t know anything about math. Or codes, for that matter. Why wouldn’t you send Carter, or even Jackson?”

Wray’s expression didn’t alter. “We did. Dr. Rush found Dr. Jackson… less than persuasive. Colonel Telford’s interest in Dr. Rush was linked to a different project, one related to Icarus, but not a part of it. He was strongly motivated to be successful in Dr. Rush’s recruitment.”

“And that’s where the bad blood between him and Jackson comes from?”

A silence descended.

Young had a intuitive, almost bodily sense that he was standing at the brink of some chasm, one that he could not see but had felt his way towards, groping through the hard dirt, certain that such a place had to exist.

Or was he remembering the caldera? Sweat and dust had gotten in his eyes as he’d climbed, and after a while he had not been able to see the ridge. He had felt his way through the rocky soil, and David had carried him, sometimes, until it was no longer possible to tell whose blood was whose where blood had soaked through both of their unsalvageable shirts.

No, he thought, watching O’Neill and Landry and Wray’s expressions. He was right. The chasm did exist. And he had come right to the edge of it, and they were hoping he wouldn’t notice. But he had noticed.

“Because there _is_ bad blood between them,” he said. “And it’s about Rush. But it’s not about anything as petty as who signed him up, is it? And, excuse my language, sirs— ma’am— but I’m pretty damn sure it’s not about math.”

No one spoke.

“Colonel Telford’s project involves recruiting individuals who possess certain Ancient genetic markers,” Landry said at last. “Dr. Rush was identified as one of these individuals through an initiative that screened all participants in the National Marrow Donor Program. I believe his wife was ill at the time— she’s since passed— tragic, of course, but something of a stroke of fortune at our end.”

“His _wife?_ ” Young had to stare at them for a second, processing this information. He had noticed that Rush wore a wedding ring, but the idea of Rush being married was so extraordinary, so outside of the realm of what Young could even imagine, that he had assumed there was a simpler explanation, like that Rush had decided to ceremonially marry his work, like those people you heard about who married Ferris wheels or dead pirates. Compared to Rush having had a wife, that seemed to make sense.

He wrenched his mind back to what was pertinent. “And then— so David, what, needed a bunch of ATA-positives for some reason, and the gene therapy wasn’t good enough—“ It wasn’t, sometimes, he knew; the SGC had been working on working to try and improve the process, but there were parts of Atlantis that only Sheppard could use.

O’Neill said, “Let’s just say Telford had reason to believe that people with these, whatever you call them, genetic markers, would be useful to the Icarus Project. Jackson had some problems with that idea. Right now, none of this is relevant to whether or not you’re going to take point on Icarus, because you’re not going to be cleared to get the full story until you’re actually in command.”

Young looked down. His hands were resting in his lap, pale against the dark blue of his uniform trousers. He hadn’t had a reason to get dressed-up like this in months, or put on any kind of uniform, really. He was wearing a brace under his coat, but it wasn’t visible— at least, he didn’t think so. He’d lost enough weight in the hospital that even with the brace the coat fit. It had felt good, putting the uniform on, like he was putting his bones back in his body after months spent living without them, so he could finally do more than crawl out of bed in the morning, so he finally had the means at his disposal to stand up straight.

He wanted to do that every day. He wanted his life back. _Your real life_ , that insistent whisper said. But—

“How much of this does Rush know?” he asked.

That caused another cascade of quick glances.

Landry, having apparently drawn the short straw on this one, cleared his throat. “All of this is currently restricted information,” he said. “Dr. Rush doesn’t have that level of clearance.”

It was what Young had expected. “And Telford?” he asked. “I mean, he could still be—“

“Tell you what,” O’Neill said. “Let’s just call it appointing you Second-in-Command. If Telford makes it back, we can rethink the situation. Otherwise, you’ll have the—“

He didn’t finish what he was saying: a klaxon sounded, and the blue light that warned of a security breach began to pulse through the room.

“Unscheduled offworld activation,” Harriman’s voice announced over the loudspeaker.

Landry and O’Neill were on their feet before the broadcast had ended, Young a painful beat behind them, though he too had felt his muscles tense before he’d consciously registered the interruption. Wray, looking startled, stared up at them.

“Well, I figured I was about due for a good old unscheduled offworld activation,” O’Neill said, sounding philosophical. But the soft lines of his aging face had gone grim. “Camile, you’d better stay here.”

Wray nodded. Her hands were clenched on the arms of her chair. Young wondered if she’d ever been in a military crisis before. It was hard to tell with these political people. Some of them were tough as nails, negotiators who’d been in the shit in Iraq or Colombia or the Balkans, but some of them, inevitably, turned out to be jumped-up bureaucrats. He had a feeling that Wray was the former, but it was hard to say for sure.

The door swung open. Landry was already talking to someone outside, giving orders.

O’Neill paused in the act of following him and looked at Young, who had one hand braced against a chair-back and was standing stupidly in the center of the room.

“Well?” O’Neill said. “You coming?”

* * *

The control room was frantic with uncoordinated action, techs hunched over their computers as Harriman, impassive as ever, stood overseeing the expanse of the gateroom. He turned as Landry, Young, and O’Neill entered— a small steady figure in the midst of so much chaos, hands clasped behind his back.

“They’ve just locked on six,” he said. “Sirs. The iris is closed and holding.”

It was. Young looked out through the broad window and saw the gate flare briefly as the wormhole connected. The crisp and tightly coiled panels of the iris held the blue light of the event horizon in. It was supposed to be an eye, he was pretty sure, that the name of the thing came from, but he always thought of a flower: its petals pure trinium and blade-like, edged.

Seeing the gate was like an unexpected gut-punch to him. The last time he’d gone through it, he’d had two working legs and a spine that held itself together. He’d been so sure of himself, so convinced of the capability of his body, like he didn’t even have a body— just a manifestation of some invincible mental energy that he would always be able to make do whatever he wanted it to do. Stepping into the weird light of the puddle, he hadn’t thought about what he was doing, that he was letting himself be unmade down to molecules, that there was any such level of… nonexistence, maybe, to him. He was a person; he wasn’t like that; you couldn’t tear a _person_ to pieces.

But you could, he thought now. Maybe. Maybe you could.

“We just had an impact,” Harriman said tersely. “Against the iris.”

There was a pause, as a kind of collective shudder swept through the room. They had all thought about it: what it would be like to come in at wormhole velocity and splinter into atoms on the trinium blades.

Harriman said, “Another impact.”

A beat.

“And another.”

The clutter of noise in the room had died down.

O’Neill was frowning. He brought one hand up to rub distractedly at his face.

Mitchell appeared at Young’s right shoulder, slightly out of breath. “What’d I miss?” he whispered. “While I was, by the way, in the infirmary, trying to talk your drama-llama roommate down from—”

“Impact,” Harriman said. “Sir, we estimate that the mass of these objects is too small to be a humanoid body. It’s likely under two kilograms.”

Young let out the breath he’d been holding. Too small to be bodies. At the very least, that meant—

“So it’s not them,” Mitchell said. His voice was still low. He glanced at Young.

Not David. Not his team. Trying to get home without radios or GDOs. Maybe even wanting the lethal wall of the iris, figuring that death was better. Thinking of it as a relief.

Harriman said, “We have another impact.”

“Like kids throwing rocks,” O’Neill said thoughtfully.

Landry said, “Something the size of a rock can be pretty goddamn lethal.”

“Another impact,” Harriman said.

Young felt unsteady. He let his hand grip the back of the nearest chair, startling a technician. “Three and three,” he said.

O’Neill glanced at him sharply. “You think?”

“Three short, three long.”

There was a silence.

Harriman said, “Sir, we have another impact. And— another. And—“

They waited for it.

“Impact,” Harriman said, his face emotionless.

“Jesus,” Mitchell said, and turned away.

Young felt sick.

Three short. Three long. Three short. SOS.

O’Neill looked at Landry. “How close are we to having a team scrambled?”

“Any minute now,” Landry said. His face was carved with unhappy canyons. “I hate to be the one to say it, but— given our current situation with the Lucian Alliance, the level of compromise we’ve experienced so far, there’s no way we can be certain that they don’t know Morse code.”

O’Neill didn’t say anything. He was staring at the circle of the iris.

“If we’re going to open the iris,” Mitchell said tautly, “we don’t have a lot of time to make that call. Sir. We have to open it before they try to come through.”

 _They._ Like he too was imagining David on the other side of that iris, David and whatever was left of SG-3, throwing rocks or bricks or burnt-up hunks of ship through the gate like they were pounding against a door with bare fists. _Open it_ , Young wanted to say. _Open it, open it, oh my God,_ because he could imagine what David would look like, dwarfed by the gate in the alien dark of another planet; he didn’t have to imagine, because it came to him now and then— not David in front of the gate, but David posed in front of the low red sun, with his shirt half-gone and blood covering his breastbone, blood coming out of his mouth when he wiped it with his hand.

        _“You should leave me here,” Young said. “Just— leave me.”_

        _David glanced away, looking desolate for a second. So tired and so sad. “You know I can’t do that,” he said._

_“I’m telling you to. Go. You can make it without me.”_

        _David exhaled long and slow, like he was biting down on pain. “I wish,” he said softly. “I really wish it hadn’t been you.”_

“Sir,” Harriman said. He sounded strained. “We’re continuing to receive impacts. Three short and three long.”

“Why not dial the alpha site?” O’Neill asked. He had his hat off, tucked under his arm; he was still staring out at the gate, but ran an absent, restless hand across his head. “For the sake of argument, let’s say it _is_ SG-3. They lose their GDOs; all right. They’re stranded. Protocol says they dial the alpha site.”

“No radios,” Mitchell said. “The alpha site isn’t going to open _their_ iris. If I’m SG-3, if I’m betting on someone out there getting the signal, someone who knows what they’re doing, someone who knows me— it’s gonna be here at Command.”

“ _Or_ it’s the Lucian Alliance,” Landry said. “Or— hell— the Ori, for all we know.”

Mitchell said, “But it feels like Telford. It _feels_ like something he would do.”

He was looking at Young when he said it, like he realized it was the first time David’s name had been uttered.

“Yeah,” Young said, dry-mouthed. “Yeah. It does.”

Landry turned away abruptly, and was talking into a radio— “I want that goddamn team _ready_ ,” he was saying, “but no itchy trigger fingers, and I mean _none._ ” When he returned, he exchanged a long look with O’Neill.

“Harriman,” he said. “Open the iris.”

Young’s hands clenched into fists. He thought bizarrely of Rush, that morning, his hands opening and closing, as though he didn’t know how to fight, or maybe _who_ , or wanted to fight and not-fight at the same time, and neither impulse had won out. Young didn’t have that problem, he thought, as his nails bit into his palms, but he had _no one_ to fight.

The strange unsteady light of the event horizon spilled into the room.

For a moment there was nothing, only the puddle’s watery ghosts and reflections glancing off the dark walls and the floor.

Then a last rock— and it was a rock, Young thought, something iron-rich, red and dusty— sailed through the event horizon and struck a crate.

There was a moment of silence. Then—

Screaming, Zack Reynolds slammed through the wormhole, crashing into the ramp and then off it, smearing blood across the concrete as he skidded to a halt. Half his uniform had been torn off him, and half his skin too, it looked like, and he _kept screaming,_ something that was almost a word, but a word that Young couldn’t make out.

“Jesus,” Mitchell breathed, and pivoted sharply towards Landry.“He’s saying _no. He’s saying no!_ ”

“Shut it down!” Landry barked, jerking forward and gripping the back of a chair with white knuckles.

Young had not realized how still the room had gone until it burst into noise.

“Sir, the iris is not responding,” Harriman reported. In the blue glow of the wormhole, his face looked ashen.

“Well, _make_ it respond, dammit!” Landry said.

An alarm was sounding from one of the computer monitors. Maybe more than one.

“What the hell is _that?_ ” Mitchell said, pointing to where some kind of smoke had started seeping through the stargate. It was dark, almost ink-black, rising upwards and dispersing as though it were being piped in.

“At a guess,” O’Neill said, looking tense, “I’d say it’s probably not good-times gas. Harriman, we have to _shut that iris_.”

“Yes, sir,” Harriman said tersely. He was working at a terminal now, fingers flying across the keyboard, his spectacles two circles of opaque glass.

“I’m giving the order to move on the gateroom,” Landry said.

No one offered any protest.

“Can we get Reynolds out of there?” Young asked. He had stepped back from the window. His nails were still cutting into the skin of his palms. “I mean, there’s got to be something we can—“

David came through the gate.

He was in the same kind of shape as Reynolds, which was what Young registered first: the half of his face that was swollen and purpled, the sound he made as he hit the ramp and clung to it with his visibly dislocated left arm. He managed to make it to his knees, and drew a shuddering breath. “Sh—“ he tried to say, and then something in him gave out, and he had to start over. “Shut it down!” Even then, his voice was rough and pain-encrusted. “Shut it _down_ , shut it down, oh _Christ_ , shut it down shut it down shut it—“

Ramirez slammed into him as she came through the gate, and he stopped speaking. Maybe he was unconscious. Young hoped he was.

He felt like he occupied some kind of island of silence in the midst of the chaos that the control room was. People were shouting, computers screeching in klaxons and chirps and other noises, airmen pushing back and forth as _someone_ tried to do _something_ , and Young had lost sight of Telford. The air in the gateroom was increasingly thick, like the wind blowing off a summer wildfire, and that black smoke was still coming through the gate.

“I don’t _care_ what you have to do!” Landry was shouting. “I want you to close that iris!”

“Sir, the iris is designed not to close when matter is being transmitted!” one of the techs said, sounding despairing.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“ _Matter is being transmitted_.” The tech gestured at the window screen.

“That _smoke_?” Mitchell asked incredulously. “That’s bullshit; you’re telling me— water doesn’t transmit; _air_ doesn’t transmit—“

“Whatever this is, it’s denser than air. Particulate matter, maybe. As long as it’s coming through—“

“Clear the gateroom,” O’Neill said sharply. “Get them the hell out of there; we can seal the whole place off and vent it if we—“

Something was coming through the event horizon. It wasn’t another member of SG-3. It was moving slow, and after a moment revealed itself as a line of black-clad figures wearing light armor over leather and sporting breathing masks. From the way they moved, the way they carried themselves, Young knew they were Lucian Alliance. There were four of them, with another four just behind.

“Put the base on lockdown,” Landry snapped, just as O’Neill said grimly, “This is a foothold. They’re trying for a foothold.”

Below, in the gateroom, the Alliance soldiers had started exchanging fire with a team of men Young couldn’t see. The air had gotten darker, and as Landry’s order carried, the overhead lights shut down to minimal levels and the warning lights began to pulse red, so that the whole scene was like a kid’s depiction of what hell might look like.

“Did they make it out?” Young said, his voice barely carrying. “Reynolds and Ramirez and—“

Mitchell gave him a sharp look. His only response was a helpless shake of his head, less _No_ than _I don’t know_ , a total inability to get a read on the situation.

Young nodded. As he watched more Alliance shoulders come through the gate, four on four, he was aware of himself as a waste of space, a useless body, without any remit to give orders and unable to take action beyond the limited recourse of, at the very last, pulling his gun. He wanted to be _down there_ ; he wanted—

And, in fact: “I’m going in,” Mitchell said abruptly, heading for the door. “We need more manpower.”

“Who else have we got on base?” O’Neill asked Landry. “We need to get them down there _ASAP_ ; we’re getting our _asses_ kicked, and—“

Young, watching Mitchell go with a certain amount of longing, had seen something else as the door opened. “It’s in the hallways,” he said.

“What?’ O’Neill turned to him, frowning.

“The gas, the— whatever, particulate matter. It’s in the halls; it’s spreading. We need to evac the civilians.”

“Shit,” O’Neill said. “ _Shit._ ”

“It could be a biohazard,” Landry said. “If we evacuate—“

“So we shut down this level. That should at least buy us time to—“

But Young lost the rest of the conversation as a thought occurred to him, so monumentally awful in its import that he took a physical step backwards and pressed his hands against the top of his head. “ _Rush_ ,” he said.

Both generals paused in what they were saying and turned their face to him.

“ _Rush is here_ ,” Young said, his voice gone narrow and panicked with urgency. “He’s here on base.”

O’Neill closed his eyes for a second.

Landry pointed a finger at Young. “You get him the hell out of here. Where is he?”

“Infirmary, Mitchell said.”

“I’ll radio Carolyn. Do _not_ lose him.”

“No, sir,” Young said.

Then he was out in the hall, almost before he had time to register that he was moving. The air was dim and gritty and sour-tasting. His gun was gripped solidly in his hands, and a spike of adrenaline let him turn the nearest corner light-footed. Soon, he thought, the pain would start to settle in, but he would keep not believing in it for as long as he was able. For as long as he had to _be_ able.

Gunfire echoed weirdly through the concrete halls. A thin layer of whatever was in the air had started to settle on the lightbulbs, creating a faint burning scent that strengthened the impression of a mountain on fire somewhere nearby. Only a chemical element to the smell made it seem disconcerting, and reminded you that what was burning wasn’t pine trees and underbrush.

Young found himself at an intersection of corridors where the smoke was much thicker. He hesitated, eyeing it where it formed an amorphous mass, like a wall that undulated. Up close, it actually had a dark blue color. There was something both seductive and fatal about it, the way that there always was about smoke— the way it moved, the round swells and currents that were beautiful before they killed you. But it hadn’t killed whoever was in the gateroom, or at least not right away, and Rush—

If he wasn’t going to let Rush end up in a bunker, he thought grimly, he sure as hell wasn’t going to leave Rush to die inside that wall of darkness.

To worse than die. To end up like—

He set his jaw and, drawing in a long breath of the air that, like pretty much all air, he guessed, was not clean, or not exactly, but was what he was going to get and therefore what he was going to have to settle for, he stepped into the consuming swarm of darkness.


	12. Chapter 12

Lam had wanted Rush to sit on a bed— possibly, he thought, because she had some idea of restraining him; she might _look_ very nice, with her casual girl-next-door demeanour, and she might be striking, at the moment, a very noble pose (the sleeves of her white coat rolled up to just above her elbows, her small mouth set in a grim expression, a serpentine alien gun in her hand), but she had stood in the center of the room, next to Johansen, affecting innocence and saying _If there’s a question I can help you with,_ and all the time she’d known about the code that lay inside of his body.

She had held his medical file close to her chest, like a particularly good card she had hoped to play at just the right moment.

A card that, with any luck, she might not have to play at all.

Rush had therefore declined to sit on a bed and had insisted on being given one of the snake-like guns, which he had not initially been offered when Lam armed the other members of the infirmary team.

They were preparing to receive casualties, that team, whilst Lam prowled restlessly back and forth by the entrance. Rush, who was leant against a nearby wall, had decided quite early on that he was unwilling to engage in any polite dissimulation in re: the fact he was watching her watching him, and as such stared at her openly, and with an evident lack of trust.

“It’s not polite to stare at people, you know,” Lam said eventually, her voice managing to be both curt and weary.

“I was under the impression that it wasn’t polite to withhold people’s medical results from them,” Rush replied smoothly. “One does learn something new every day.”

Lam sighed. “There was absolutely no reason for you to know, and nothing you could do with the information.”

“Oh, I think you’d be surprised at what I can do with a little bit of information.”

Lam made a frustrated sound, one that seemed to translate, roughly, to _Why do I bother._

Rush felt surprisingly hostile towards her, in spite of the fact that she was likely quite low down on the conspiracy chain. Mitchell, certainly, was higher; Mitchell would not have given him the file in the first place. Jackson had known; had David? Oh, yes, he thought, David had known. David, who had reappeared so solicitously in Young’s kitchen not long after going to hunt for Lucian small fry. Who had shown Rush the stargate in defiance of regulation, and who probably would have engineered a trip through it if such a thing would have got Rush to commit— to him, to the project, to the Program, the fucking _Program_ , with its underground mountain and its equivalent layers of military secrets, its interstellar enemies and its as-it-turned-out really quite fatally shitty infosec.

Had Young known?

Which had come first, was the question— the math or the genetics? Why had they wanted him? That was the _real_ question.

But had Young known?

Fuck them. Fuck them all. It didn’t matter. He was glad that their fascist fucking institution was under attack. (But had Young known?) It was a bit of an inconvenience, true, that he happened to be inside it at the moment, but he could appreciate the one whilst being moderately concerned about the other. He was certain that nothing too serious was happening, and at any rate, Lam had given him the gun.

Momentarily, he paused in his surveillance of Lam’s surveillance to actually inspect the weapon. It was dull-coloured and shaped like a calligraphic stroke. He found he did not like it, but he was reassured by its presence. Now that he had it, he had no intentions of giving it back.

He was contemplating how strenuously Lam was likely to object to this last decision when someone knocked on the door, or rather banged: a big hollow rusty sound that caused Lam to stiffen.

She shot Rush a warning look before depressing the button of an intercom and speaking into it. “Please identify yourself.”

“Colonel Everett Young,” Young’s rough-edged and familiar voice said. “I’m here for Rush.”

Rush bristled at that. “No. You are not _here for me_ ,” he snapped as Lam swung the door open and Young, looking exhausted and oddly dusty, as though he had just emerged from out of a coal pit, came in. “I’m not a package you’re here to pick up.”

Young wiped a hand across his face, leaving a streak of pale skin free of coal dust. “I could put you in a box,” he said. “If it would make you be quiet and _be where you’re supposed to be_ , Jesus, Rush! If Mitchell hadn’t—“

Lam interrupted. “What’s the situation out there? We haven’t heard anything since the evacuation order.”

“Well,” Young said, leaning against one of the infirmary beds and wincing, “it’s a shitshow in the gateroom. Your— General Landry radioed you, yeah?”

She nodded tersely.

“I haven’t seen any signs of improvement since then. The Alliance is pumping some kind of gas through the gate, and it’s made it as far up as level 22; I saw it coming through the vents on my way here, so you’re gonna see it soon. We don’t know what it does yet, but it seems to be nontoxic. By now we should be sealed off from the surface, just to be on the safe side, but I’m still aiming to get Rush out.”

“Excuse me,” Rush said loudly, because he violently disliked being discussed in the third person.

“You’ve got a plan?” Lam asked Young, ignoring Rush.

Young shrugged and grinned ruefully, making a neither-here-nor-there gesture. “You know. The usual.”

Inexplicably, Lam smiled at this.

“ _Excuse_ me?” Rush repeated incredulously. “You’re not going to put me in a box, and you’re _certainly_ not going to take me _anywhere_ if you haven’t got a plan with which to circumvent the no-doubt insufficient security measures that—“

Lam was staring at something.

Rush turned to look, and saw tendrils of smoke leaking in from under and around the door. He found it hypnotic, charting their turbulent little motions. They were a very dark blue colour, so dark that they could almost be mistaken for black.

Young dropped his head for a second. “Shit,” he said. He sounded more tired than ever, which for Young was a significant statement; Rush had the impression that each new level of exhaustion had been carved by Young with his bare hands from stone.

Lam said, “We’ve got masks. I’ll get some.”

The clip of her heeled shoes provided the soundtrack to her hurrying away.

After a long moment, Young raised his head and squinted at Rush. “So,” he said. “The infirmary? I thought you were supposed to be down on level 24.”

Rush said, “The meeting ended early.”

“Yeah,” Young said. “I’ll just bet it did.”

“Fuck you,” Rush said automatically. “I resent what you’re implying.”

“You _resemble_ it, I think you mean.”

Rush did not respond. He was looking at Young, who was half-bent over, hand digging into his hip, wearing a grimace. He tracked lines of pain that formed soft brackets at the sides of Young’s face. There was something he was inspecting Young for that he could not identify exactly. He was attempting to evaluate if Young had known. _The infirmary?_ Young had asked, and when he had said _the infirmary_ there had been a note of bemusement in his voice, an authentic rising inflection, but if he were a really skilled liar then perhaps—

If he were a really skilled liar then perhaps Rush was fucked, because he did not know the identity of the Lucian Alliance’s agent.

Lam returned, carrying two gas masks by their straps. “I don’t know how much they’ll help,” she said. “Since we don’t know what this is. But they can’t hurt.”

The air in the infirmary was beginning to appear faintly bluish and dim.

Young took one of the masks and shoved the other at Rush, who fumbled it over his face, unsure exactly how it functioned. He had never before found himself in a situation in which gas masks were required. He was still attempting to secure the straps when Lam moved to stand behind him and, without a word, gently tugged them into place.

Rush glared at her, but she gave him an impassive look and checked that the mask was positioned properly.

“You good to go, hotshot?” Young said. His voice sounded imprisoned. Rush could hardly see his face.

“I don’t know; are _you_ good to go?” Rush returned, irritated. “You look like a medical cadaver; perhaps you ought to stay in the infirmary.”

“You say the sweetest things.” Young was, in fact, listing heavily to one side, and as he stood upright he made an audible sound of pain. “But you’re not getting rid of me that easy.”

So, left with little other option, Rush followed him to the door.

He had a moment of hesitation, as he looked out into the corridor, where the air had begun to assume a crepuscular shade and texture that he associated with insomniac nights. Ahead of him, Young was a dark blue slab of nothingness, a phantom, faceless and armed. Rush’s own fingers were sweating against the snake-gun. A _zat_ , Lam had called it, to which Rush had huffed and said, _Typical. It sounds like a name for a children’s toy._

It felt very real in his hand now. He might have to use it against Young, if Young were to turn and— what? Was a member of the Lucian Alliance meant to look different, somehow? Would he see the change come over Young’s face? Possibly Young would eye him with the same bleary exhaustion and say, _Sorry, hotshot_ , and Rush would have to raise this children’s toy of a weapon, this trinket, and pull the trigger.

It occurred to him that he had never fired a gun.

But when Young did in fact turn, it was only to say, “Come on, let’s blow this popsicle stand already,” a familiar blend of annoyance and resignation the only expression evident on his face.

So Rush stepped forward, his heart made loud in his ears by the gas mask.

Behind him, Lam said, almost too quietly to hear, “Good luck.”

* * *

They walked in silence for two lengths of the corridor or more. Young’s footsteps were slow and uneven, but Rush did not comment. He himself was off-balance, albeit in a metaphorical rather than a material sense; the base around him had assumed an unfamiliar appearance, turned dim— Rush realised— not only by the traces of gas, but by the emergency lighting. The fluorescent overhead bulbs had dimmed, and the blue warning lights pulsed like a siren through air that was, objectively, silent, though _subjectively_ it was not silent, or rather it was silent but Rush’s subjective experience of the atmosphere was one in which noise figured prominently: the subtle sounds of his own circulation, the louder sounds of every breath.

Eventually he could not stand the claustrophobia of such a situation, the sense of being contained in some biological prison. “Where are we going?” he hissed at Young.

“Stairway,” Young said tersely.

“Why—“

“Elevator’s shut down.”

As answers went, this was logical and succinct. Rush accepted it and proceeded without speaking for another few paces, past dark and empty labs whose doors had been left ajar. He was sweating in his blazer, not because he was nervous, given that there was nothing particularly unnerving about the situation, or certainly nothing that he was not capable of handling, let us say, and at any rate he was not in general a nervous person; possibly he was sweating because the base was unusually warm, the air conditioning perhaps having its own emergency protocols, which struck him as particularly laughable for some reason, perhaps because he was imagining the highly classified meeting at which a committee of po-faced generals had discussed the ins and outs of crisis air conditioning; or quite possibly he was sweating because the gas mask in some way interfered with his oxygen intake; he knew hardly anything about the mechanical structure of gas masks, and it made sense that the military would fail to prize the ability of their footsoldiers to cognitively function in a crisis, and instead focus on ensuring that—

“There must be some purpose to the gas,” he said aloud. His voice came out too thin and much too tense.

“I don’t know,” Young said. “It was keeping the gate open.”

“Denser than air.”

“Yeah.”

“But there are a number of methods through which they could have achieved such an objective, and presumably they too require both visibility and oxygen.”

“Yeah,” Young said again.

They had reaching the stairway door. Young heaved it open with obvious effort and leaned against it for a moment, breathing hard.

Rush gave him a quick, assessing look. “Are you going to make it up the stairs?”

“Don’t worry about me, hotshot,” Young said. He sounded strained and hollow. “I’ve been doing this stuff for years.”

“You should put your weight on me,” Rush said.

Young shook his head, unspeaking.

Unaccountably riled by this refusal, Rush pushed through the door. “Suit yourself, then. If you lose consciousness, I’ll leave you for the Lucian Alliance.”

“You should,” Young said. He was right behind Rush, letting the door swing closed behind him. But he pushed past Rush almost at once, gripping the stairwell and leaning forwards to look upwards.

Rush followed the motion, and saw where the fine smoke thickened into a mass of dense, dark-blue fog. “It’s coming from above,” he said. “Through the vents.”

“Yeah. Shit.” Young had his whole weight tilted towards the railing. His head was bent now, curls plastered to his head under the mask’s straps. “We’re gonna lose visibility up there. I need you to put your hand on my shoulder so we can stick together.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Rush said irritably. “You put _your_ fucking hand on _my_ shoulder.”

“Rush—“ It was possible Young was sighing; Rush couldn’t tell through the mask.

“I’m sorry; did I say ‘don’t be ridiculous’? I meant _stop being such a cunt_.” Rush seized Young’s hand and dragged it roughly to his own shoulder. Before Young could offer any coherent protest, he had started forwards up the concrete stairs.

Young followed suit, though he could easily have knocked Rush over. His hand on Rush’s shoulder was hot, and heavier as he gradually succumbed to the inevitability of allowing Rush to support him. His fingers dug into the juncture of deltoid and trapezius muscles, thumb pressing against the clavicle line. They made a strange too-many-legged stumbling sort of creature, staggering their way up into the growing dark.

“Am I cold,” Young said, when they had rounded the level 19 landing, “or are you running a fever?”

“Fuck off,” Rush said shortly. He did in fact feel rather warm; he wished that he had discarded his blazer, but he would not be warm and he would not be sweating if he were not undertaking the excess work of half-heaving Young up these fucking stairs, and his breath would not be so short, either, and neither of these two significant physical symptoms had an etiology that was connected to the dark that was becoming increasingly darker, the dark that closed in increments around them, more smothering even than the gas mask, and metaphysically resonant of so many closed spaces, skittering up and down the limbic system with hair-fine limbs; he was not _afraid of the dark_ , and this was not dark at any rate; it was merely some form of particulate matter, probably, in the air, and he was moving in space so he was not enclosed, and so long as he was not enclosed he was perfectly safe, and Young’s laboured breaths and laboured footsteps preceded him through this opposite-of-aether, so Young was the bloody canary in the coal mine that Rush had ended up in, and wasn’t he doing his ancestors proud, and all of this remained true until they reached level 17 and a wave of blue smoke rolled down upon them, and it became immediately apparent what the utility of the substance was.

“What the fuck,” Young breathed, staring at Rush.

Rush’s ears were filled with a peculiar buzzing, not quite humming, though oddly high-pitched. He felt cold, although as he studied his hands without any particular emotion, he understood why he had previously felt so strangely hot.

His skin was emitting a pale glow that he would perhaps describe as ice-coloured, so light blue as to be almost perfectly white and clearly visible through the smoke. The clean line of his collar and the white strip of shirt where his blazer was unbuttoned were softly phosphorescent, not quite containing the radiance of his skin.

“I—“ Rush said. He did not complete the sentence.

He raised his right hand and watched it move like an anemone, an animal unconnected to his body, bioluminescent and be-tendrilled and floating in the deep. It was beautiful, he thought, but it was not his, it was not _him_ ; it _was not human_ , because humans had no light-emitting molecules; they did not produce luciferin or luciferase; they were not sea creatures; they were not fireflies, who harboured chemical reactions that turned them into cyphertext, short-lived little code machines.

But he was not human. He had known that. Or not completely human. What was it to be human, anyway? Was there a place where it stopped and started, some genetic quota? A lineage required of every human being? Could he pass a test? Some form of bioassay, perhaps. Or _would_ he pass a bioassay?

“Rush,” Young said.

The Lucian Alliance had known. The smoke had had a purpose, and the purpose of the smoke had been this: to elicit exactly this response, one that he could not control, one on a molecular level, one that made him impossible to hide. They would _see him_ , as surely as the camera that turned towards the jellyfish in the dark, following the faint trace of photons from its luminescent bell, a bell that could not ever, ever stop ringing, and the sound distorted in water that looked black but was not really and was very very deep and it travelled and travelled and travelled and—

“ _Rush._ ”

Rush dragged his eyes to Young’s face. To what he could see of Young’s face, behind the plastic shield of the gas mask. “Yes,” he said. He swallowed. Young’s hand was still on his shoulder, large and solid and stabilizing and a little bit softer-gripping than it had been.

“We have to keep going,” Young said. “We’ll worry about it later, okay?”

“I’m not _worried_ ,” Rush bit out.

He would have shoved Young’s hand off him, but could not, in good conscience; instead he started forwards determinedly, ignoring the weight of Young’s concern pressing against him as claustrophobically as the smoke.

He could navigate by the light.

Stairs emerged from the darkness.

There was no reason to panic.

Or even, as Young had said, worry.

In fact this was if anything a beneficial adaptation.

If he were truly a cnidarian, he would have no central nervous system, only a sort of distributed net, and that would be better, perhaps: sensing through his skin and never processing, the information incoherent, and he would move like that amidst the changing layers of the ocean, and panic would not be a part of his physical makeup. It would not be an available potential for him.

Not that he was panicking.

He could not orientate himself, however, in the muffled darkness. He was floating trance-like in an alien sea. His breath sang in his ears and there was a pitch to it, to his breathing, but he was unable to determine the pitch. It did not belong to a twelve-tone equal temperament, or to just intonation.

“Just— stay calm,” Young said, his voice sounding strangled. His hand had clenched convulsively on Rush’s shoulder. “We’re getting off at sixteen. We’re almost there. We’re almost—“

And then abruptly he was shoving Rush face-first into the sharp-edged slope of the stairway, landing on top of him as some sort of energy blast exploded overhead.

Rush could not breathe for a moment and he did not know why at first and already he was fighting, trying to rise above the uppermost level of ocean and arrive at where the oxygen was, before he realised that he was dazed and hot and dark and under Young’s suffocating body, and that he had struck his shoulder against a concrete step and it hurt, and that someone was shouting nearby, indiscrete and blurry, and Young—

Young was firing his gun. “Stay down!” he shouted at Rush, when Rush shoved at him, but Rush had a gun as well, he had a _gun_ , and he was not going to die like this, pinned down with his face ground in the dirt, or, all right, there was no dirt; the fall had not cracked the shield of his gas mask, but he was aware of his futile fingertips scrabbling against the concrete for purchase and he _was not_ going to lie there and let the boot-tip connect with his ribs, his metacarpals be pulled joint by agonised joint from whatever object he was holding, and already the filthy fucking ocean-coloured air, tasting of tarmac, was threatening to give him the boak; and perhaps—

Rush sank his teeth into Young’s upper arm, and capitalised upon the ensuing moment of distraction to crawl jerkily on his elbows and knees till he was free enough of Young to bring the alien gun up, and—

—perhaps if he were a cnidarian he would not have these mad fucking impulses, these absonous limbic misfires, and instead he would have one amicable body, an instrument incapable of dissonance, tuned to a single note, and he would glow like he did now, eerie and Arctic and inhuman in the darkness, but he would not be as he was now, he would be— what he would be was—

He was making the gun work, which he did not know how to do precisely, but Lam had said to arm it and fire one shot to stun, two to kill, and he did not know what his intent was because he had not killed someone before and was not sure if he desired to, and when he had imagined it (he had not imagined it) he’d had the dented brass base of the living room lampstand in his hand, he had not been at a distance like this, and so he fired once, but he did not know if he had hit anyone, because how were you meant to know if you had done? —with the noise and the muffling of the gas mask and Young shouting and the resonance of the stairwell, so very rapidly he made the decision to fire again, and then again, and again, and quite possibly the shots were going rather badly astray, because his hands were shaking, and he had engineered through some crustaceanic sequence of movements to have his back shoved up against the far wall, and for some reason Young was taking the gun from his resisting hands and saying in an angry tone of voice, “Rush. _Rush._ ”

“ _What?_ ” Rush snapped, and pushed himself up to his feet, aware in gradual increments that the crisis was over and had perhaps been over for several moments.

“What the hell do you think you were doing?” Young demanded. He too had risen and would have been breathing hotly right in Rush’s face had his temper not encountered the containing shield of his mask.

Rush made to move past Young and head for the landing. But Young blocked his way with one arm. “I was saving your bloody life!” Rush spit, elbowing at the insignificant barrier.

“What, by trying to get yourself killed?”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“Only because you were a _distraction_.” Young grabbed Rush’s shoulder as Rush started to turn. “ _Rush._ This is not a game.”

His voice had dropped; there was something low and urgent in it, almost pleading. His eyes were hard to make out in the dark. The slightly blue glow of bioluminescence gave them a strange colour, unlike their usual amber. They were searching for something with an intensity that Rush found he could not tolerate.

“I know it isn’t,” Rush said, unsettled. “Do you not think I know that?”

“So next time I say stay down, you _stay down._ ” And then Young had the gall to shake him.

Rush jerked free of his grasp and strode towards the langing. There was a body sprawled across it, and another in the doorway, preventing the door from closing. Blood had leaked out almost to the lip of the first stair. Rush avoided its tributaries so that his boots would not leave prints when he reached the hallway. He stepped over the loose arm of the corpse in the doorway and held the door open, waiting for Young. The corpse was lying face-up, but it was wearing a breathing apparatus that obscured most of its face. It occurred to him that he had assumed it was a corpse but he was almost certainly correct because the faceplate of its mask was not fogging. He could not see if its eyes were open or closed.

Young paused to collect the weapons from both bodies before he limped to where Rush was still waiting. “Thanks,” he said.

“Why are we on level sixteen?” Rush said in return, letting the door swing closed behind them.

“Because there’s a security monitoring station on sixteen, and you’re going to hack us a way out of here.”

“I’m going to _hack_ us a way out of here,” Rush repeated disdainfully. “Have you ever used a computer? Has anyone explained to you that it isn’t simply a magic box that does your—“

“Shh,” Young hissed suddenly, thrusting a hand out.

Rush stumbled into it. The air of level sixteen was as dark as the stairwell had been, only intermittently lit where the overheads managed to penetrate the blue-black smoke-fog, and the chief illumination was provided by Rush’s own skin.

“What?” he whispered.

Young shook his head.

Then Rush heard the chirp and blast of energy weapons, followed by gunshots, their source unseen— perhaps on the other side of the nearest intersection. Someone cried out, a rough and awful sound of pain that didn’t stop so much as it dwindled. The whir of another energy blast.

Rush felt Young’s hand grip the front of his shirt and drag him towards the nearest wall, which he fought against: “Stop— fucking— _slinging me about_ —“ he grated out, his voice swallowed by the mask and by the pressure of Young’s body against him, to which Young said only, in a furious undertone, “ _Shut up._ ”

But apart from the pain-sound that kept going long after it should have ended, till it did not even strike Rush as horrible but merely set his teeth on edge, no other noise followed. No more gunfire. No footsteps approaching.

Rush could feel Young’s laboured breathing against his own chest. Young’s whole body was trembling with small muscular spasms. Young himself did not seem aware of them; his head was cocked and listening.

After a certain amount of time had passed, Rush began to grow restless. “I want my gun,” he whispered.

That at least broke Young free of the unfathomable bellicose trance into which the sound of combat seemed to have propelled him. He looked down at Rush, uncomprehending. “What?”

Young was holding his pistol in one hand and the alien zat gun in the other.

“That’s mine." Rush pointed to the zat and made a grab for it. “If you die, I don’t intend to have to _talk_ my way out of your institution’s monumental fucking incompetence,” he snapped, when Young seemed prepared to struggle with him for it.

“ _Fine_ ,” Young said shortly, and let Rush have it. His face was looking whitish behind the shield of his mask. “Come on.”

He turned and strode off without another word, apparently able to navigate by memory, or by the very faint auras of lights like stepping stones in the dark. _Strode_ , really, was optimistic as a word choice; Rush ought to have said _staggered_.

He wondered if Young was going to make it out of the Mountain, and what would happen if Young did not. He was not sure if by that he meant what would happen to Young or to him. The image of the limp hand of the Lucian Alliance corpse in the stairwell came into his mind without warning. It had flopped when Rush had opened the door, like the tail of a dead fish heaved onto a butcher’s block, but recognizably human and the colour of skin.

“Rush!” Young barked out up ahead.

Rush flinched. “Yes, all right,” he said tightly. “I’m coming.”

Clutching the zat gun, he cut his way through the smoke that was still curling around him in billows, very similar to water in its visual aspects, which only heightened Rush’s sense that he was under the sea and drifting, prey to the jagged maws of creatures that could move both skilfully and covertly through deeps that were yet inaccessible to him.

Young was standing in one of the unsteady quadrilaterals of not-quite-darkness created by the artefacts of overhead lights. He had his weapon pulled and fixed on something further down the corridor.

“No,” Young said tensely as Rush approached. “Don’t come around the corner. Stay right where you are.”

Rush narrowed his eyes. “What—“

But another voice broke in. It was a high voice, a girl’s, speaking a language with which Rush was not familiar. “ _Eheragka!_ ” the girl said. Her voice was wavering. “ _La aysil. Eseha_. _”_

“It’s okay,” Young said, adopting an artificial, soothing tone. “Just put the gun down. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“ _La,_ ” the girl said. “ _La sur. La aysil!”_

“Your friend— is he hurt? We have doctors here.”

Rush flattened himself against the wall and edged up towards the corner, ignoring Young’s warning gesture, enough that he could get a look.

The door to what he assumed was the security monitoring station was open, spilling light into the hazy corridor. A long-legged wee sliver of a girl was knelt in that bright parallelogram, clutching a large man’s body to her lap with one hand and utilizing the other to point an alien weapon at Young.

The details of the situation were difficult to make out. The girl and the man were Lucians, Rush assumed, judging by all of the available clues. The spreading blood on the floor, unmistakable even in the dark, suggested that one or both of them had been wounded, and not by energy weapons.

The girl shook her head in response to Young’s question. “ _Ha mot_ ,” she said. Her voice broke on the second word.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Young said steadily. “He was protecting you, right? You two partners? Or, no— he was your bodyguard, right?”

Something in the girl’s body must have communicated itself to him, a flinch or a tightening, some silent clue, because he continued: “You’re science caste; I can tell. You’re not a soldier. I’m sorry about what happened to him. But you’re not going to help him by getting yourself killed. I have backup. You don’t. So just put the gun down.”

For a moment it seemed as though the girl would not. Then, slowly, she lowered the weapon and sent it skidding across the floor to Young. He picked it up, almost disguising the effort it took him to complete the motion, and advanced on her position.

“His too,” he said, gesturing at the dead man with both guns. Then: “Rush!” he called. “Come help me with this.”

Rush stepped around the corner and saw the girl’s eyes flicker to him, widening a little as she took in the look of him, the light.

Young handed Rush the second Lucian weapon.

“What the fuck am I meant to do with this?” Rush asked, turning it over and inspecting it. It was more like a pistol than the zat had been, with a complicated trigger and a safety mechanism.

“Don’t get shot with it,” Young said tersely. He was checking the dead man’s body, his own gun still fixed on the girl.

“ _Ha la lahim,_ ” the girl said, directing a frustrated look at Rush. “ _Shkart.”_ Seen close, she had eyes like hard chips of amber and very long, remarkably ginger hair.

“Yeah, well,” Young said. “I do that. Now you. Up.” He gestured.

“You can understand her?” Rush asked. He hadn’t been certain.

“Of course I can— oh,” Young said. The girl had stood, and he was patting her down roughly. “You haven’t been through the gate; you don’t have the translation matrix. You speak English?” This last question was directed at the girl. “What’s your name? What house are you?”

“My name is Ginn,” the girl said. “I am Sixth House. Western Principality. Yes. I speak English.” She had a heavy trace of an accent.

Young stepped back from her. “I’m betting they brought her up here to mess with the computers,” he said to Rush. Then, to the girl, “Is that why you’re here?”

She looked away, biting her lip, and didn’t answer.

Young turned to Rush. “Could she have done something to the base’s systems? Put a— virus, or whatever, in them?”

Rush had been staring past the pale ambit of his own radiance, down the smoke-filled hall to the left. He could just make out, under the nauseous and spitting, sickly green flicker of an overhead light, the slack forms of two men wearing military uniforms. At least— he assumed they were men from their approximate size, from the width of a pair of shoulders and the blunt fingertips of an outstretched hand. What he knew of the American military’s typical demographics suggested, anyway, that this was most likely the case. They were not moving, so he assumed that they were dead. They looked—

Dead.

“ _Rush_ ,” Young said.

“Yes,” Rush said. He redirected his attention away from the strange topography of this landscape, Hallway With Two Dead Men. “Yes. I apologise. I wasn’t listening to the question.”

Young studied him for a moment without speaking. Then: “I asked you if she could’ve put some kind of virus in the base’s systems.”

Rush tried to rake a tense and jerky hand through his hair, forgetting the straps of the gas mask, and ended up merely making a nervous, frustrated motion. “If we survive this situation, I’m going to demand that promotion to the rank of colonel within the stargate organization be made contingent upon the completion of a computer literacy class.”

Young rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, but—“

“Was she carrying anything on her? A mobile phone, a flash drive?”

Young held up a slim black USB stick.

“Then, most likely, yes.”

“Great.” Young shot a venomous look at the girl. “Can you _undo_ whatever she did?”

“I can certainly try to.” Rush plucked the USB stick from Young’s fingers. It felt like a bone fragment or a pottery shard, an artefact of a civilisation that he found incomprehensible for a moment. But something of its materiality communicated itself through the luminescent barrier of his skin, and abruptly the USB stick alone seemed real, like a sort of breathing apparatus that offered to interface his lungs with a bright and oxygenated world above, and he closed his fist around it, taking a shuddering step towards the monitoring station.

For some reason he had been thinking of whalefall. Or. No. What was it called, the whale while it was falling? Marine snow. A beautiful term. It was not only whales, but a continuous rain of life that was not life any longer, travelling down through the bathypelagic zone till it came to rest at the bottom of the ocean. It exhibited Brownian motion. Bodies formed and reformed, made particulate by the dissolution that death wrought upon them, but colliding in their long slow spins and exerting upon each other a strong and startling amount of binding force. It too was bioluminescent. The snow. But it was _not_ beautiful, surely. It was only decay, and everything was eaten, in the end.

Bones spit out like the lumps of bodies in the hallway with their useless plastic breathing masks.

But he was not thinking about the bodies. He was above the ocean now. The quality of light in the monitoring station made his hands look less inhuman as he plugged the flash drive into the station’s desktop computer and sat down to code. It was a familiar posture. It was the posture of a human. A human posture. Of course it was. Because _he_ was human. What else would it be? This was a tautology, but— he reflected, as he went about booting the computer from the girl’s USB— it was one he would have to live with for the moment.

The computer hummed as it powered down and restarted. Rush adjusted his glasses and caught the outline of his reflection in the screen, a narrow ghostly face trapped behind glass or what looked like glass, an animal glowing in the aquarium of his assemblage-body. Abruptly he found that he could not breathe; he could not _breathe_ in this mask that was designed to optimise human breathing; he was suffocating, and he clawed at the straps of the mask, trying to get them loose so he could tear it away from his head, and—

“Rush,” Young was saying. “ _Rush_. What the hell are you doing?”

Rush flung the mask across the room with more force than he intended. It struck the wall with a loud sound and landed face-up on the floor.

“I couldn’t breathe,” he said, his voice coming out wobbly-edged, unsteady. He swallowed. The gas tasted faintly sour but did not make him sick. “I couldn’t _breathe._ ”

When he looked up, Young was regarding him with an expression that was difficult to read behind the shield of his own mask. Rush could see the white face of the girl over his shoulder, her lost eyes and smudged skin. Freckles, he thought. Below the soot from the smoke, she had freckles. And then he did not know quite why he had noticed that.

“Okay,” Young said at last. With his unarmed hand, he reached up and pulled off his own mask, tossing it to lie in the corner beside Rush’s. He ran a hand through his dark and matted hair. “I guess it can’t do too much damage at this point, right?”

“That was never its purpose,” the girl said quietly from behind him.

“You stay where I can see you,” Young said to her harshly, brandishing his gun.

She crept into a corner of the room, hugging her arms around her too-thin body. But Young in fact paid little attention to her. He came to stand beside Rush and placed an unnecessary hand on his shoulder.

“Are you going to fall down?” Rush asked somewhat limply, unable to summon his habitual level of spite. “Has your boy-scout mania for energetic and inadvisable antics exhausted itself, wonder of wonders, at last?”

“No,” Young said. “I figure I got a few good antics left in me.” But he didn’t remove his hand.

“Well,” Rush said, and then couldn’t decide how to complete the sentence, so left it lacking a conclusive elaboration. He turned back towards the computer screen and watched as it settled into the familiar carnelian of a BackTrack environment.

“You know we’re going to make it out of here, right, hotshot?” Young said in a low voice after a moment.

Rush said nothing. He took a breath and reached for the keyboard, watching as each key revealed its previously obscured letter, scoured by the helplessly revelative light of his skin.


	13. Chapter 13

Rush had been working on the computer for a long time, longer than Young would really have liked. Young hoped it was because he was getting close to clearing the base systems and unlocking them a goddamn elevator, not because he was having some kind of psychotic break.

Though actually Rush had held up pretty well so far, given the, you know, general Lucian Alliance of the whole situation, and the possibly-toxic smoke and the shootouts and the dead bodies and the random glowing thing. At the very least, he hadn’t freaked out or thrown up or started shouting, all of which would have been pretty reasonable reactions to the circumstances. And he was calm now, or acting like it, his brow slightly furrowed and his eyes moving rapidly across the computer screen.

“You getting anywhere?” Young asked, leaning in.

When Rush answered, his voice was vague. He frowned at the computer. “You should ask her who trained her,” he said. “She’s using standard Earth tools— Metasploit, for God’s sake, like some basement-dwelling script-kiddie about to saunter in twenty minutes late to my CompSec seminar. I’m assuming it didn’t spontaneously evolve in outer space.”

Young looked at the girl— what had she said her name was? Ginn?— who had folded herself into the corner and was hugging her knees. It was hard to feel sympathy for her when she’d almost certainly taken down at least one of the guys who’d been KIA in the hallway, and had been pretty damn ready to do the same thing to Young himself.

“Hey,” he said, jerking the gun he’d kept loosely trained on her. “Lucian Alliance. Who taught you how to use a computer?”

The girl focused her eyes on him slowly, like she was coming out of a trance state. “Machines were provided,” she said. “In function they were not dissimilar to those used by the System Lords, with which I was already proficient. I was ordered to master their language and operation. So I did.”

“Yeah, but _who_ provided the machines? Someone here? Someone from Stargate Command?”

She shrugged listlessly. “It was not my place to ask.”

“A little bit low in the pecking order, are you?” Young said spitefully.

She turned her head away from him. Her red hair was escaping its ponytail. A chunk of it had fallen in her face. “Yes. I am a little bit low in the pecking order.”

“I’ve disabled most of her malware,” Rush said in the same distracted voice, “but she’s used some sort of homemade SecureShell knock-off to remotely control all access to the gate. Give me a few moments.”

“We need to get a move on,” Young said. “Someone’s going to figure out that she’s not the one running this party.”

He wasn’t sure Rush had heard him at first. Then Rush said, “Yes, yes. I’m working on it.”

“And the elevator.”

“I _said_ I’m working on it.”

Young was being short-tempered, he knew. But if he stopped to acknowledge the reason, then he would have to think about the pain in his hip, which by now had transcended the strict definition of what he would call pain, and was off in some outer region of space all on its own. If he’d had a screwdriver handy, he might have jammed it into his lower back to relieve the muscle spasms that felt like they were about the same size and solidity as hand grenades, but at some point he would’ve hit bone, and the bones already felt shattered.

“        _David,” he said, and coughed up what felt like a gob of mucus but was maybe blood. “I can feel the pieces of my leg.”_

        _“You’re imagining things,” David said._

        _“Yeah? You— you think so?”_

       “ _Right now you’re actually in a beautiful garden.”_

        _“Never much liked gardens.”_

        _“Where the fuck do you want to be then, the Ritz? All right, you’re at fucking El Patio, hungover, eating stuffed sopapillas, getting a sunburn like some sad white boy who never should have left Wyoming.”_

        _“What kind of stuffed sopapillas am I eating?”_

        _“You’re eating shut-the-fuck-up sopapillas. Can we just climb this goddamn mountain?”_

        _“David,” Young said._

        _“What?”_

        _“Let’s go back to New Mexico.”_

        _“I’ll take you all the way to fucking Antarctica if you want, buddy, but we gotta get back to Earth first.”_

        _Young stared up at the hazy rings that bisected the sky. On one side was the sky and on the other side was the sky, but the sky was different. He couldn’t understand why the sky was different, why it seemed to have a different color or texture. It made him feel nauseated to look at, or maybe that was the grate of bone on bone in his pelvis._

        _“David,” he whispered. “I don’t think I ever should have left Wyoming.”_

Young turned away. He watched the girl. He didn’t trust her. He didn’t _like_ her. He didn’t like the _Lucian Alliance._ He felt light-headed, enough that he closed his eyes for a second.

The real reason he wanted Rush to hurry was that he knew adrenaline was the only thing keeping him going, and once he hit the lip-line of the inevitable crash he wasn’t going to be able to get Rush out of there.

“You are injured,” the girl said. When she’d switched to English, she’d gained a little bit of an accent, just enough to make her seem like the alien she was; the inflections were all wrong somehow, in the wrong places. She was watching him with eyes that reminded him of an eagle or an owl, some kind of hunting bird.

“No,” Young said, riled. “I’m not fucking injured, okay?”

“I’m releasing the central elevator,” Rush said, frowning at the computer screen and typing. “But locking it to your ID card.”

“Great.” Young took stock of their weapons. “We’ll have to take our Lucian buddy over there with us; I don’t want her shutting the elevator down when we’re still in it. We can leave her locked in a mop closet on level one.”

Rush wrinkled his nose in an expression of distaste. “A mop closet? Really? How primitive.”

“As far as I’m concerned, primitive is good. Unless you think she can hack the base with a plastic bucket.”

“It’s highly unlikely,” Rush said. He was still fiddling with something on the computer.

“C’mon,” Young said, antsy. “Let’s get out of here; I’d rather not wait till this place is crawling with—“

Without warning, the girl sprang at him.

She knew where to hit—she must have been biding her time, tracking his movements, even before he’d spoken, paying attention to how he moved and when he winced, because she went right for his right hip, throwing her shoulder against it and taking him down with hardly any effort.

He couldn’t breathe or see or think for a second.

When he came to his senses, he was face-down on the floor of the room, and he was missing his gun.

“I won’t hurt you,” the girl was saying, somewhere above him. Her voice was wavering, high and frightened and tense. “I don’t care if you are one of these— these— the lab rabbits. I am not interested in the nine chevrons. You are science caste. Like me. But if I stay here, they will kill me for my failure. So you will please give me the key to the elev— the eleven-eight-or, and instead of shooting, I will only imprison you here.”

“Oh, please.” That was Rush’s voice, caustic and dismissive. “You think you’re going to— what? Elude your cornfed alien empire and the American air force to run away and live on Earth? When you don’t even know what an elevator is? How much money do you have in the pockets of those skintight leather trousers?”

“ _You_ will give me your money,” the girl said, sounding slightly uncertain.

“I’m afraid that’s not how money works. It’s all electronic, you see. I don’t doubt that you could manage to steal some in the long term— your code has a certain amount of promise, although I know twenty graduate students who are just as good— but I rather think in the short term, before that happened, you’d wind up in a very unpleasant prison of some sort. That is, if your own people didn’t shoot you in the back of the head.”

Young lifted his head fractionally, just enough to get a look at the standoff.

Rush had turned his chair to face the girl, and was holding his hands in the air. The girl was pointing her own weapon at him and had an awkward grip on Young’s gun, like she didn’t really know how to use it, maybe, but was more than willing to have a go.

“You’re lying,” the girl accused Rush.

Rush’s eyes flickered to Young and lingered there for a second with intent. “Not at all,” he said smoothly. “The American military is somewhat notorious for its prisons, and for its dubiously intentioned eagerness to shut people up inside of them. I myself am only semi-successfully evading such a nonconsensual relocation at the moment on the grounds that _you_ —“ he pointed to her— “want to kidnap me and torture me, possibly because I am the only Earthling capable of intelligent thought, but, let’s be honest, more likely because I appear to be, as currently _demonstrandum est_ , capable of generating luciferin, though I can’t imagine why this would be of use to you.”

Young thought he was getting the idea: Rush could talk pretty much anyone into a coma just by being, well, Rush, and the girl didn’t really seem to have thought her whole plan through in the first place.

Very subtly, he began to shift his position. It was agony, of course— he had hurt before the girl knocked him down, and he hurt more now than he had then; the absolute muscular control required to make his movements small and noiseless seemed like it might actually be physically impossible, at first, so fast did it rocket from ordinary pain to that other nameless thing that orbited in the region of the Kuiper belt, but he couldn’t afford for anything to be physically impossible at the moment. So, with the brutal simplicity that had gotten him through boot camp and SpecOps training, through the attack on P2S-569, and halfway up a caldera with an oozing knife wound and a broken back—

        _“You just_ had _to come rescue me,” David said, heaving Young’s arm over his shoulder. “Some kinda last fucking action hero.”_

        _“Yeah, well,” Young managed, trying to not to throw up on him. “Thanks for returning the favor.”_

        _“Where’d you leave your ship?”_

        _“That’s sort of the bad news.”_

        _“When do I get the_ good _news?” He twisted his head to give Young a sharp grin. They were close enough to kiss, if they hadn’t both been hurting so badly._

—he gritted his teeth hard and concentrated on breathing.

“I suspect,” Rush was saying, “that in fact the luciferin is an incidental byproduct of what is really at issue here, namely my more-interesting-than-average genome, which has occasioned so much attention from the many diverse parties who have proven so very, very averse to sharing what they know about my body.”

Young winced, and not because of the spasm that was currently ripping through his psoas muscles. Yeah, all right. So Rush had figured out that little piece of information. And from the tone of his voice, brittle and very, very pointed, he was pretty damn unhappy about it, too.

“I do not understand you!” the girl said, sounding agitated. “You are not speaking English! I do not wish to kidnap and torture anyone. Give me the key!”

Concealed by the smoke, Young had managed to get his feet almost into a launch position.

“Sorry,” Rush said, not sounding very sorry. He leaned back insouciantly in his chair. “I’m afraid I don’t negotiate with terrorists. Not because of some moral principle, you understand— I just find it incredibly tedious on a personal level.”

The girl stepped forward and pushed the muzzle of Young’s sidearm against Rush’s forehead. She seemed to be struggling with herself. Then, abruptly, she stepped back and hit Rush across the face with the gun. It wasn’t a good hit, made more out of panic than any real force, but it was enough to send him reeling sideways for a second.

“Give me the key!” she said again.“Give it to me, and you will not be tortured!”

Rush lowered one of his hands to touch his lip where the blow had split it. When he saw the blood on his fingers he smiled, but it wasn’t a nice smile. “Darling,” he said very deliberately, lifting his gaze to lock eyes with her, “I’d like to see you try.”

That was when Young took her down.

She didn’t struggle much, which surprised him; once he had her pinned on the floor and had wrestled her arms behind her long enough to tie them there with his belt, she just gave up and lay there, limp.

“Should’ve done that in the first place,” Young said, levering himself up off her. “Serves me right for underestimating her. You okay?”

Rush was using the sleeve of his blazer to wipe the blood off his face. He stared at Young like he didn’t understand the question.

“You’re bleeding,” Young said. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Rush said. He sounded puzzled, possibly because he was brain-damaged. “I’m fine. Are _you_ okay?”

Young, who was approaching almost-unprecedented levels of not-okay, said, “Just dandy. What do you say we get out of here?”

Rush nodded haltingly and rose. “What do you intend to do with—?” He gestured at the girl.

Young prodded her in the ribs with the toe of his boot. “Hey. Up and at ‘em, unless you’d rather be knocked out than locked in a closet.”

Slowly and dispiritedly, the girl struggled to her feet. She reminded Young a little bit of a baby horse, the new-born kind that hadn’t figured out how to walk yet, and or learned how to carry the weight of its body on its legs. “Shoot me,” she said in a bleak voice, without looking at him. “You might as well shoot me. I am asking you to. Please.”

“Oh, come on,” Young said, shoving her towards the door. “He was lying about American military prisons.”

Rush looked offended. “I wasn’t.”

“Well, you’re a biased source.”

“I’m a potentially _imprisoned_ source.”

“It’s better than being dead, all right?”

Rush said, “Actually, I was thinking we should take her with us.”

That stopped Young in his tracks. Literally: he froze halfway in the act of reaching for the doorknob and turned his head, probably with a rictus of disbelief on his face. “What the _hell?_ ”

Rush shrugged. He was inspecting his zat, or pretending to.

“She hit you in the face with a _gun!_ ”

“Mm.”

“You’re still _bleeding!”_

Rush touched his lip again, gingerly, and inspected his fingers. “A little.”

“I’m locking her in a closet,” Young said.

He twisted the door open and shoved the girl out first, to see if anyone shot at her. He hadn’t heard any Lucian forces amassing outside, but he’d been pretty busy trying to convince his nervous system not to go on strike, and he might have missed something important. He figured that whatever the hell was going on with Rush— like, biologically speaking, with his stupid fucking to-no-one’s-surprise apparently-space-alien body— was probably trackable, and therefore probably _being_ tracked, but he didn’t know how, or where exactly that rated on today’s Lucian Alliance to-do list. He was hoping it was a little bit lower down than “secure the base,” and that maybe he and Rush still had a little bit of time to fly the coop, if they played their cards right.

To his intense relief, the hallway was silent. He did a quick visual recon in both directions, and didn’t see anything except the smoke, which was still pretty thick.

And the bodies, of course— he almost walked straight into the Lucian girl when she failed to move because she was frozen, staring at the corpse of her dead friend.

“Let’s go,” Young said, prodding her with his gun. It wasn’t that he was unsympathetic, exactly; but on the other hand, he’d been there. He knew it didn’t do you any good to stick around with the dead.

The girl still didn’t move. “What’s going to happen to his body?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He’d never thought to ask about what happened to the bodies. “Burned, probably.”

She turned her large and oddly bird-like, haunted eyes to him. “On my world we bury the dead. It’s very important. He was from a different world, but he had no one left. Please. Can you ask them to bury him? There is a prayer I ought to say, but it takes others, and there are not enough of my people in Sixth House, and— but at least he could be buried.”

Young sighed, and gave in to the urge to lean a hand against the wall, just for a second. Even that second was too long— he could feel the need to slow down, to stop, to _just hurt_ , as bad as the craving for any opiate. He had to straighten up right away. “Yeah,” he said. He moistened his lips. His mouth tasted strange, metallic. “Sure. I’ll put in a word for you, okay?”

“Thank you,” she said.

After that she walked without complaint.

“We should take her with us,” Rush said after a few minutes, from just at Young’s elbow. He’d seemed oddly casual, almost comfortable, since the girl had threatened him, which just figured— you could count on Rush to have his polarities reversed.

“Keep your voice down,” Young said. “They’re probably tracking you.”

“That had occurred to me.”

“Well, so, do you really think now is the best time to have this conversation?”

Rush appeared unfazed. “She’s an excellent source of intel, and obviously willing to defect.”

“We’ve got enough problems without adding teenage fucking Lucian Alliance defectors!”

“I would estimate her to be, at youngest, an undergraduate.”

“The answer’s no,” Young said. “Also, take my ID card.”

Rush frowned at him. “What?”

“Unclip my ID card. It’s on the front of my coat. I want you to hang onto it for me.”

Very slowly, Rush reached out to take the card from Young’s uniform jacket. He closed his fist around the card. He didn’t say anything.

Young didn’t look at him. He was scanning the hallway ahead, and keeping a watchful eye on the muted red of the girl’s hair as she ran a semi-reluctant point for their operation.

“I’m not in great shape,” he said finally, when he’d run out the clock on not having the conversation. “I’m hurting. If we run into another firefight, I may not make it out. If that happens, I want you to take the card and go. Get off the elevator at level three and hang a left. There’ll be a metal door marked MAINTENANCE. It leads to an access shaft. Take the ladder up to the top. You’ll come out alongside Norad Road. Don’t report back to the base. Get as far away from here as possible. Don’t go to the apartment. Don’t trust anyone. Ditch your phone. You got a knife?”

“No,” Rush hissed, with an intense air of what was either distaste or fury. “I do not have a _knife_.”

“There’s one clipped to the inside of my left pocket. Take it.”

Rush didn’t look happy about it, but he did it. “Enlighten me as to what I’m meant to do with this?”

“Cut the transponders out of your arm. Don’t smash them. Plant them somewhere. You understand?”

“Of course I fucking understand!” For a second, it seemed like Rush was going to hurl the pocketknife across the hallway. He shoved it into his pocket instead, and looked away abruptly, pressing his lips into a thin line. “I didn’t furnish your kitchen to my exacting specifications only to forfeit my access at the first chance,” he said, after a while, when Young had assumed they were done talking.

“Yeah, well,” Young said, and then wasn’t sure what to say exactly. He settled on just reiterating, “Do _not_ take that goddamn Lucian girl with you when you—“

—And that, of course, was when a Lucian strike team started shooting at them.

The Lucians had been lying in wait in one of the cross-corridors, sheltering behind the abandoned laboratories’ partly-open doors. Young should have seen them, he thought, should have caught some flinch of movement or the brief glint of an energy rifle in the smoke, but his back was fucked and it was a white noise blaring away at his senses, so he hadn’t, and suddenly bolts of energy were slicing through the air.

He couldn’t get Rush behind him, because he was too caught up in trying to return fire; he had to hope that Rush would at least drop the hell to the floor and try not to get hit, although he didn’t have a lot of faith that Rush was possessed of even that much common sense. The Lucian girl was; she’d hit the ground the second the bullets started flying, and he’d lost track of her in the smoke.

The kick of his gun was hell, and he was having a hard time keeping his shots steady, because he could feel it all the way to his teeth. But he took at least two of the Lucians down— one permanently, he thought, judging by the spray of blood on the dimly lit wall.

He had to switch to the Lucian weapon he had taken off the dead man pretty quickly, because he had run out of ammo and he didn’t have an extra magazine. The Lucians used the pause to storm the main hallway, black figures who didn’t look human with their faces obscured by their narrow breathing masks. Young grappled with one briefly at close quarters, trying to achieve enough leverage to pull back and get a shot off, but he didn’t have it in him, and he knew it— whatever _it_ was, that mysterious quasi-spiritual _it_ that had to burn inside you if you were going to fight your way out of—

        _“That’s what you got me for,” David said. “C’mon, I always knew you were just using me; I just didn’t expect it to be as a crutch.”_

        _Young laughed, a laugh that turned into a choke and then into a long sound of pain that he buried in David’s shoulder. “You should go without me,” he said. “Take the ship. I’m slowing you down.”_

        _“It’s better if it’s both of us,” David said._

—a situation that you shouldn’t be able to fight your way out of.

        _“It’s better if it’s both of us,” David said. “Twice the bitching, half the speed, but hell if I’m gonna let you haunt me, Young.”_

Rush was shooting from somewhere off to the side, surprisingly clean and accurate gunwork that hit one of the Lucian soldiers square in the stomach. At least, Young thought it was Rush until the Lucian soldier he was fighting threw him against the wall, and over the man’s shoulder he caught a glimpse of the red-haired Lucian girl with her arms free, taking aim at one of her own kind and getting the shoulder of her leather jacket singed half-off for it, something that didn’t seem to faze her that much. She hit the next man she aimed at.

Young was hoping the guy who had him in a chokehold was on her list, because he wasn’t having a whole lot of luck prying those hands loose, and his vision was starting to white out. He couldn’t really feel his legs.

But it was Rush who came out of nowhere, taking the guy down like the tiniest linebacker in history so that Young could finally suck in a breath.

He couldn’t do much more than breathe for a second or two, all his limbs feeling like limp balloons full of water, aware, in a dazed, confused way, that he wasn’t dead.

When the world came clear around him, Rush was standing over the Lucian soldier, pointing a zat between his eyes.

“Shoot him!” the Lucian girl said sharply, picking herself up off the floor across the hallway. “What are you waiting for?”

The man’s eyes darted to her. “You bitch,” he hissed. “We should’ve left you on your slave planet to whore for the farmers. We should’ve—“

She took the zat from Rush’s unresisting hands and shot him in the head.

Then the hall was silent.

The girl returned the zat to Rush. She had to curl his fingers around the grip, or he would have let it fall.

“You have to shoot them before they see you’re afraid,” she said.

Rush didn’t say anything. He was staring down at the man’s corpse. After a moment, the girl left him there and went to strip the bodies of weapons.

Young peeled himself off the wall and went to Rush.

“You know,” he said after a minute or so of silence, “I think I was pretty clear that the knife was for taking care of your transponders, not cutting loose someone I’d literally _just tied up_.”

“Yes, well,” Rush said, without looking at him. He sounded tired. “I used my best judgement. I’m afraid my marksmanship leaves something to be desired, whereas hers is… effective.”

“Yeah,” Young said. He put his hand on Rush’s shoulder. “Yeah, it is.”

Rush turned his head and frowned at the hand, then raised a questioning expression.

Young said, “You mind? I’m trying not to— how did you put it?— be such a cunt.”

“Ah,” Rush said, and didn’t comment when Young gave his shoulder a hard, awkward, and unnecessary pat of reassurance before allowing Rush to bear his weight again.

The girl came back with her arms full of guns and offered one to Young. He ditched his sidearm and took it, inspecting the trigger, as she strapped two more into the side holsters of her tunic.

“Where is the escape pod?” she said. “The one you wish to reach?”

“You coming with us now?” Young said, raising his eyebrows. It wasn’t like he was in the best shape to protest.

“Yes. I am coming with you.”

“And you’re not going to try to kill us anymore?”

“I am not trying to kill you now,” she pointed out.

“That’s less reassuring then you seem to think it is. I’d like a guarantee.”

She looked at him with her large, serious eyes, letting her gun hang at her side. “In the Alliance, they say that there is no honor among men who are running for their lives.”

“Yeah? And what do you say?”

She bit her lip and looked at Rush. He did not appear to notice her looking. “I believe that it is wrong to die with a gift unrepaid. I will try not to try to kill you.”

There was something so absurd about the statement, or maybe about the whole situation: the jumble of bodies in the hallway, and the jellyfish-like glow off Rush’s body, the fingerprints of soot on the lenses of Rush’s glasses, and Young hanging off him like a half-dead weight, and facing them this spindly little strip-of-nothing girl whose Medieval-looking leather clothes were stiff and black— Young noticed— with other people’s blood, whose face was smeared but whose expression was resolute and oddly honest.

“Well,” Young said, running a hand down his face, “I guess that’s all anybody can ever ask for, really. Let’s head to that, uh, escape pod; sound good?”

The girl nodded.

After that, he couldn’t really keep thinking of her as _the girl_ , though, so when they had reached the elevator, he said, against his better judgment, “I'm Young. He's Rush. What’d you say your name was?”

“Ginn,” she said, and watched as Rush swiped Young’s ID card through the reader. The doors lurched open. “My name is Ginn.”

* * *

There were no Alliance soldiers waiting for them when they ditched the elevator on level three. The air there was clear, or almost clear, with only a trace of smoke in it. Rush looked almost normal again, if a little green around the gills; you had to look hard to spot the glowing.

Young sent Ginn up the maintenance shaft first, just in case she got any hot new ideas about honor, with Rush behind her. Rush didn’t like that; he wanted Young in front of him. But: “If I go down,” Young said, “I’m sure as hell not taking you with me.”

“Is that likely, do you think?” Rush asked. His tone was casual, diffident, but he searched Young’s face for an answer.

“Just get on the goddamn ladder,” Young said.

Yes. It was likely. He had trouble closing his fists around the first rung of the ladder. Already, his palms were slippery with sweat. He couldn’t support his full weight on his right leg, and the left felt out of alignment. He had entered that sort of dreamy, out-of-body state where he was aware of the pain, but not really connected to that awareness. It was something happening to a body that he happened to be located in, not something that directly impinged on his actual being. He could keep going forever, he thought, like this, though at the same time he knew from experience that he couldn’t, and that he would get no advance warning when the body where the pain was decided it was time to quit.

He tried to focus on putting one hand over the other. One hand, then one foot, then one—

        _hand lost its hold and scrabbled fruitlessly for a hold in the loose red gravel. His palms were scraped to shit. He swore._

        _“Just— hang in there,” David panted. “Think happy thoughts. Think about all the morphine they’re gonna hit you with back at Command.”_

        _“You should have left me,” Young said. He was seeing things by that point, angels that he knew weren’t angels, just narrow bright flashes in his peripheral vision. They looked like Biblical angels, weird and sharp and like they’d have too many teeth if they opened their mouths. He thought that the fact that he was seeing them wasn’t good._

        _David heaved him up with an arm under his shoulders. He said, “That was never going to happen.”_

        _“I know,” Young said. He felt hopeless. “But I’m not going to make it. I don’t think I can stand up.”_

        _“That’s what you got me for,” David said. “C’mon, I always knew you were using me, I just didn’t expect it to be as a crutch.”_

        _Young laughed, a laugh that turned into a choke and then into a long sound of pain that he buried in David’s shoulder. “You should go without me,” he said. “Take the ship. I’m slowing you down.”_

        _“It’s better if it’s both of us,” David said._

There was water dripping somewhere inside the shaft; he could hear it but not see it. He could smell it.

He wished that Rush were still glowing, because it would have reassured him to see the outline of someone he had managed to save.

Although technically he had managed to save David.

If David was still alive.

He didn’t mind dying as long as he saved someone, because he thought that a part of him would go on living, maybe, inside the person that he had saved— not in a literal way, but just that he’d always have written something of himself into them or onto them, a permanent footprint he’d left on the moon-rock landscapes of their lives. Extend the metaphor and he could see himself out in space, drifting, a lonely cut-loose astronaut whose vac suit made sure that nothing would touch him, ever. But still somewhere there were these footprints.

They had stopped moving. He didn’t notice till a guillotine blade of light dropped down on him from up above. Then he realized that the girl, Ginn, had gotten the top of the shaft open, and air that smelled of grass and sunshine and exhaust was pouring in.

Both Rush and Ginn had to help pull him free of the shaft, and he still almost slipped at the last moment. He had a vision of himself plummeting all the way back down through the darkness. Lost in space, he thought. But instead his knees hit a patch of earth, warm and bleachy-grassed. He doubled over, letting his fingertips dig into the soil slightly.

After what was probably too long for him to convincingly pretend that he was not on his last legs, he raised his head and squinted up at them: at Rush, who had his eyes closed and his arms wrapped tightly around himself, his lips pressed together but still making little involuntary twitches, as though he felt the need to speak but no longer knew how the process worked, and Ginn, who was inspecting an inch-wide strip of blackened skin on her bicep, not seeming to notice that she was covered in continent-shaped patches of someone else’s blood.

“Well,” Young said. “We made it. How’s everybody doing?”

There was a half-beat of silence, and then the absurdity of his own question caught up with him, and he laughed helplessly and couldn’t stop, an almost noiseless laugh that hurt in his chest, where it started. He wasn’t sure if it were a real laugh or some kind of combat reaction, because he didn’t have much to laugh about, but on the other hand, they were here: raked with the early autumn sunlight of an afternoon in the mountains, and he thought that if it wouldn’t have hurt to tip his head back, he would’ve drunk the sunlight in.

“I think we should steal a car,” Rush announced matter-of-factly.

“A car,” Ginn said thoughtfully, like she was testing out the word.

Young covered his face with his hands, because he thought for a second that he might actually cry laughing.

“I’m quite adept at stealing cars,” Rush said— and then added, sounding peeved, “I don’t know why you’re laughing.”

Ginn said, “I do not know what a car is, but I am also quite adept at stealing things.”

Young gave up and stood unsteadily, still wet-eyed, with the considerable help of a nearby tree. He leaned against it, feeling the bark tangle in his hair. It was a relief to lean on something and not worry about getting killed instantly. He felt like he’d been beaten badly, or possibly run over by a semi, and Earth’s only bulwark against space invaders was under attack, and David was dead, maybe, or not, and Mitchell, and Rush glowed in the dark because he was part-alien, but at least Young could lean against something.

Rush and Ginn were looking at him, waiting for his response, or maybe for his approval. He made a vague sweeping gesture, trying to communicate the whole scope of his situational assessment, but probably they were on the same page or thereabouts, which was that they were fucked, mostly. So: “That all sounds good,” he said. “Sure. Why not? Let’s go steal a car.”


	14. Attention

_Earlier_

Chloe walks back into the conference room with her face burning, aware that everybody is looking at her: her dad and his PA, Amelia, who always calls Chloe “honey,” and Dr. Perry, and Jeremy, who’s from Camile Wray’s office, since Ms. Wray had to go meet with General Landry, and the blond sergeant who was in charge of the meeting, Scott, and all the other military people, and the scientists that she doesn’t know. Everybody. Their expressions range from pity to boredom. They think that she’s a stupid little girl.

“I think Dr. Rush is going to be more motivated to work with us when he’s had some time to process the stakes of the initiative,” she says. She uses a lot of words like _motivated_ and _process_ in her leadership role on this project. These are words that help reframe the problems her team is facing in positive terms and suggest a no-judgment view of emotional needs. The words you use to communicate with your team are the cornerstones of every organization. She knows they are. She read it in a book.

She sits down.

“Well,” Lt. Scott says, and looks uncertain.

Chloe opens her neat blue binder with the embossed silver lettering that says CLASSIFIED across the top. “Item one on the agenda was introducing Dr. Rush to the initiative,” she says. It was; it is; it’s there below the heading that has the name of the initiative and the date. “I think we can consider that item accomplished. Maybe we should move on to discussing item two.”

She looks over at her dad without meaning to, and he smiles at her like she’s done well. But she thinks she shouldn’t have looked at him. And she shouldn’t have said _maybe_. She doesn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. He gave this project to her. He doesn’t know anything about video games, but that wasn’t the only reason. _I’d just like to see you challenge yourself a little more,_ he’d said. _I don’t want you getting stuck in my shadow; I worry about you_.

She wishes he had said _You’re the perfect person for this project_ , or, _I can’t trust anyone else with this_. And he did, sort of, later, when he said, _It’s a great launching point for you. You’re more than qualified; you’ve been working on my staff since the campaign, back when you were sixteen, and you did that environment project in college, what was it called—_ SustainabiliDC, Chloe had said. _Plus you’re young. You know the kind of people we’re trying to reach here._

So she was the perfect person for the project, really, even if he hadn’t said it like that. And when he said _I’d like to see you challenge yourself more_ , he didn’t mean _Why don’t you challenge yourself enough_ , except that he did, a little bit; she’s a project leader now, and that’s what she would have said. Reframing the problem in positive terms. You don’t have a problem, it’s just that I’d like to see you solve this problem. It would be great to see that happen. I’m so excited about it.

 _It’s exciting to see you really putting your energy into a project that deserves you._ That’s what her father had said.

Dr. Perry is talking about Ancient computer coding, and how its requirements are going to influence the graphics of the game.

Chloe forces herself to look interested. She doesn’t understand very much about computers, and she doesn’t like being around Dr. Perry, who is nice but makes her feel small and stupid in a way that she hates.

Dr. Rush made her feel that way too, at first, when he looked at her like she wasn’t worth his attention. Like she was a piece of furniture that had suddenly opened its mouth to talk. But then _he’d_ started talking and she’d realized that even though she hadn’t looked at him like he was a piece of furniture, maybe she had been thinking that way about him. Like the Icarus Project was one of those little miniature scale models of buildings that people brought to her dad’s office sometimes, when they wanted his support for libraries or community centers or redevelopments, and she could reach in and pick up the plastic figure that was him. Just pick him up and put him somewhere else when he was no longer needed.

She doesn’t want to be a person who treats people like that.

Her dad scribbles something on his agenda and underlines it, then tilts the binder subtly towards her. He’s written, _PAY ATTENTION!_

Shame rises in her face and she has to blink once or twice before she can hear over the noise of her own blood pounding.

She is paying attention. She is.

But she straightens up anyway, trying to make her posture more subtly encouraging somehow, lifting her perfectly plucked eyebrows, which she had agonized over in the hotel bathroom that morning, not wanting to look too Hollywood starlet, but also not wanting to look too severe. _Are_ they perfectly plucked? She thinks so. She hopes so. She has to look mature. She has to look confident. She has to look responsible. She has to look like someone who can hold people’s lives in her hands.

* * *

Later, much later, long after that meeting, someone will give her her father’s binder, and she’ll wonder where they got it from. How do all these things turn up, saved when they weren’t the things that needed saving, like God just punches holes in the lid of the world with a pen— like she used to when she was a little girl, to keep caterpillars, moths, and fireflies— and only the smallest insects manage to crawl out? The smallest things: a SustainabiliDC pin he’d kept in the top right drawer of the desk of his office, a scarf she’d given him for Christmas when she was twelve, a binder with a note scrawled on the first page. _PAY ATTENTION!_

* * *

She is still in the meeting when the alarm goes off. She doesn’t know what it is at first. The term _unscheduled offworld activation_ has no meaning for her. She had to do a standard safety training when she got cleared to come to Cheyenne Mountain, a year ago, when her dad told her about aliens and the stargate. Probably that briefing covered what she was supposed to do, but there was so much information, and none of it seemed real, or urgent. She’d been teamed up with a scientist who’d just been hired, Lisa Park, and they’d had to take turns pretending to be brainwashed by the Lucian Alliance, reading off of prepared scripts, but neither of them had been able to make it through the exercise without laughing. And she had learned to shoot a handgun without breaking her wrist. But she can’t remember all the acronyms and alerts and color levels. She should have studied, she thinks. She should have been more prepared.

“Okay,” Lt. Scott says, when he hears the warning. “I’m sure there’s nothing to be worried about. Standard protocol; we’ll be locked down until the coast is clear. Probably won’t take too long.”

But a couple of minutes later, someone carrying a rifle rushes into the room and whispers urgently in Lt. Scott’s ear, and Lt. Scott’s face looks different after that. He says, “Folks, Sergeant Greer here is going to evacuate all civilians to the surface. I’m afraid they need me in the gateroom, and I’m going to need all Air Force personnel— and you, Dr. Perry— to come with me.”

That’s the last time she sees Lt. Scott.

Outside, in the hall, blue strobe lights keep going off. They remind Chloe of the top of a police car. The overhead lights have all been dimmed, and there’s a funny smell to the air. People in uniforms and white coats keep rushing past, looking panicked, even though Sgt. Greer says, “There’s nothing to worry about, people. Let’s just stay calm and stick together.”

“Dad,” Chloe whispers, pressing up against her dad. “What’s happening?”

She can’t let him put his arm around her shoulders. It wouldn’t look right. And she can tell he knows that too, because he sort of lifts it up and stops and glances at her. But at least she knows he wanted to. And that’s what matters, isn’t it? The wanting-to. Not whether you did it.

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” he says. “I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”

Chloe arrives at the realization, abrupt but very long-brewing, that her life is extraordinarily full of men who tell her that there is nothing to worry about at moments when it is manifestly logical to be worried. She arrives at the realization that they do this to reframe the situation in positive terms, when what they really mean is _I am not going to allow you to worry_ , or, possibly, _I don’t believe that there is anything you could do._

She arrives at the realization that she resents being denied the right to worry.

She wants to know what’s happening. She wants to know what she can do. What she might _have_ to do.

That’s about the point at which they reach the stairway, and meet Camile Wray coming from one of the lower levels with a larger group of civilians. Because Ms. Wray almost never has an expression other than intimidating and a little bit ironic, except when you really wear her out and she loses her patience, she doesn’t look scared. But there’s some kind of dust on her face, and she’s definitely not happy to see Chloe and Chloe’s dad.

“Senator Armstrong,” she says. “Chloe. I thought they’d have gotten you out.”

“I think they’re trying,” Chloe’s dad says, gesturing to the slow evacuation up the stairs. “Has anyone told you what’s going on?”

Ms. Wray hesitates. “I believe,” she says carefully, “there may be some question of an enemy incursion. When I last saw them, General Landry and General O’Neill were both taking command of the situation, so I’m sure by now it’s well in hand.”

The situation doesn’t feel well in hand.

“Senator,” Chloe’s dad’s PA calls. She has her phone out. “I’ve had a request to institute emergency protocols.”

Chloe’s dad hurries over to her, and they huddle together, heads bent over the electronic glow of the screen as they keep climbing.

And keep climbing.

At first soldiers were running up and down the stairs, pushing past Chloe, and there was a lot of noise. You’d think that was alarming, wouldn’t you? All those people rushing past you, and so many of them carrying guns. But in fact it’s worse when it stops— and it does, gradually, stop— because then it seems like no one is alive outside the stairwell. Chloe imagines them climbing and climbing forever, way beyond the normal Earth level, up into the soundless vacuum of space, which doesn’t end.

Something is leaking into the air.

At first she thinks it’s smoke from something burning. But it isn’t. She knows, because—

They reach level fifteen and get hit with a whole wall of the stuff, foul and chemical-smelling and bluish-black.

It washes over them like a tsunami, but one without any noise or force, just a big wave of _nothing_ that steals the light and leaves Chloe fumbling in a shapeless depthless and unnavigable dark, and she is alone, or at least she can’t see anyone, and she can’t really hear them, or she can’t match sound to what she’s seeing; she doesn’t even know which way is up or down; it’s just limbs groping in the darkness, and people gasping and choking and coughing, and someone is saying, “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” and someone else is crying in little gasps, and the whole body of people is moving like they’re one animal startled by a predator on the savannah, jerky and running before it can get its legs under it.

“I need everyone to _stay calm!_ ” Sgt. Greer says, raising his voice, from far up in the darkness. “I said _stay calm!_ ”

But someone else is shouting, shouting unintelligibly, maybe at him.

“Dad?” Chloe says, and her voice wavers, which— she shouldn’t let it, really; she’s a team leader, she can’t stand in a stairway and cry for her dad. But she can’t see him. He was ahead of her, and now he’s not anymore. “Dad?” she says again.

Someone grabs her arm with a small firm hand, and Ms. Wray’s face appears close to hers, resolute and maybe, for the first time, unsettled. “Chloe,” she says, “I’m going to need you to hold onto my hand and stay calm.”

Chloe says stupidly, “I can’t find my dad. He has— his heart’s not good, and if the smoke—“

“It’s okay,” Ms. Wray says. “I don’t think it’s toxic. I can still breathe; can you breathe?”

Chloe nods, and then realizes Ms. Wray can’t see her, and says, “Yes.”

“So we can rule that out.”

“People keep telling me I shouldn’t be worried,” Chloe whispers. She doesn’t know why she’s whispering. Maybe because the smoke makes her feel like she’s in a very small room. “But I think I should be worried. Do you think I should be worried?”

Somewhere above them, a door slams open. Chloe flinches, and almost misses the next step.

Ms. Wray’s eyes are very serious and very dark. “Yes,” she says. “I think you should be worried.”

Chloe slips her hand into Ms. Wray’s hand. Linked like that, both their palms hot and sweating, they fumble forwards, feeling out the concrete stairway like it’s the wall of a cave.

She has lost track of what level they’re on so she just makes her feet keep moving.

This step.

And then the next step.

This step.

And then the next.

Ms. Wray’s hand clenches around hers suddenly. “Chloe—“ she says.

But her words are cut off by a burst of gunfire.

Chloe shrieks without meaning to, like someone’s grabbed the sound from inside of her. She throws her hands up, which is the stupidest thing she could have done, because it’s not like hands can stop bullets; it’s such a strange example— she thinks in a long dazed moment during which time seems to slow and swell— of how human evolution hasn’t managed to keep up with technology, because her body, like all bodies, wants to protect itself, but it no longer knows what the threats are or how to face them. She can’t deflect a bullet in midair like she might a bobcat or a tiger; she can’t stop it from reaching vital organs, because it’s going to go right through as though she weren’t even there, as though there was nothing to this silly scrap of flesh and bone she calls a body.

Someone shoves into her hard and crushes her against the railing, and she realizes that she hasn’t been shot. She hasn’t been shot, and people are panicking.

They surge past her, struggling to get up or down the stairway, a mass of faceless threatening bodies.

“No,” she tries to say, “I can’t move; I can’t _move_ ; get off me; I’m here; I’m _here!”_

But she can’t hear herself because everyone is screaming, and she can’t push her way into the brief and frightened stampede, and there are more gunshots, a confused back-and-forth of noise in the darkness, and then eventually there are no more gunshots, and no more running, but someone is shouting, “This is a _priority!_ I need a medic, _stat!_ ” And she is crouched against the railing in the dark with her arms folded over her head, and she is hyperventilating, breathing in much too much of the dense black air, and she can’t move until one last straggler trying to make a confused escape from the gunfire barrels into her and knocks her sprawling. Her head hits one of the concrete stairs.

“Chloe!” someone shouts.

She is crying.

“ _Chloe!_ I need you to talk to me so I can find you, sweetheart, okay?”

Yes.

“I’m—“ she says. Her voice is too thin and shaky. She doesn’t sound like a team leader anymore. Her mouth is full of blood, and she doesn’t know why. And then she does know. The stair. She split her lip when her face hit the stair. “I’m here. I’m here!”

Ms. Wray appears out of the darkness, holding up a cell phone like a flashlight. It broadcasts light in a weak greenish square.

She doesn’t look relieved when she sees Chloe. Her face goes tense, and she drops down to pull Chloe’s blazer back. “Are you hit?” she asks brusquely. “Where are you hit?”

Chloe doesn’t know how to answer.

“Chloe,” Ms. Wray says. She sounds almost angry. “You’re bleeding. Where are you bleeding from?”

Oh.

“My,” Chloe says. She touches her mouth, wincing. “My lip, I fell, I don’t think I— I don’t think I’m hurt—“

“Thank God,” Ms. Wray says under her breath. Then, to Chloe: “Get up; I’m getting you out of here.”

Chloe lets herself be pulled up. But— “My dad,” she says. “Where’s my dad?”

For a long, long moment Ms. Wray just looks at her.

Chloe stares stupidly back.

“We took casualties,” Ms. Wray says haltingly. And then she says, “We’re waiting for a med team.”

Who talks like that, is what Chloe wants to know. Who _talks_ like that? _Casualties_ ; what does that even mean? _Soldiers_ talk like that, but Ms. Wray isn’t a soldier, and she’s never talked like that, and how can it be that people open their mouths and suddenly talk like entirely different sorts of people? Chloe had _coffee_ with Ms. Wray once; they talked about gender politics inside and out of the IOA, and whether there were more opportunities for ambitious women in interstellar organizations than there were in terrestrial ones. Chloe ordered a cinnamon roll and dissected it with her fork, layer by layer. Gradually the air smelled like cinnamon. She sat nearest the window, and it was raining, and the rain made little constellations against the glass.

“What do you mean, casualties?” she says.

Her mouth feels wrong.

And then she is running up the stairs, tripping and half-falling and having to catch herself in the darkness, as behind her Ms. Wray calls, “Chloe! _Chloe!_ ”

There is a pale circle on the far side of the next landing where Amelia, her dad’s PA, is holding up a small flashlight. The light keeps moving, because Amelia is crying. Chloe has never seen Amelia cry before.

The light keeps moving, but Chloe can still see her dad lying in the center of it. He is _lying_ there on the _concrete landing_ , when he doesn’t even like Chloe to touch what he calls “common property.” He always used to scold her for holding onto the escalator railings at airports with her bare hands, instead of pulling down her sleeves. _You don’t know who else has touched that_ , he’d say, _or what else they’ve been touching. Remember that whenever you touch something, it touches you back._

“Dad,” she whispers, just as Sgt. Greer looks up from here he’s pressing something— silver piping, she registers; Amelia’s forest green jacket— down on her dad’s dark-stained chest.

“He’s hanging in there,” Sgt. Greer says. “Med team’s on the way.”

He doesn’t say, _Don’t worry._

“He put me behind him,” Amelia says in a horrible thick voice all broken-up by crying. Her arm is bleeding, Chloe realizes. The arm that’s not holding the flashlight. One of the sleeves of her shirt has been torn off and tied around it. “He covered me. When the shooting started.”

“Why would he do that?” Chloe asks. She doesn’t know why it’s what she asks. It’s just the first question that comes to her, the first piece of information she needs to understand. “Why would he do that; why would you let him _do_ that?”

Her voice rises in pitch until she’s shouting, almost, and Sgt. Greer says tersely, “I’m going to need you to keep your voice down. We’re in the middle of a foothold situation.”

“I’m not going to keep my fucking _voice_ down!” Chloe drags her arm across her face, not because she’s crying, but because of the blood, because her mouth is still leaking, because a hole got punched in it and now it won’t stop. “I want to know why he would— why would he _do_ that?”

“Chloe,” Ms. Wray says softly, and touches her elbow.

This noise comes out of Chloe that isn’t a noise, a noise she didn’t know she could make, like what she really wants is to scream, but someone brought a boot down on her ribcage right when she was trying to do it, so none of the actual noise comes out. It’s awful and it hurts the inside of her and she can’t seem to stop it, and she drops down next to her dad, grabbing his hand.

It just feels like his hand. It doesn’t feel any different. But he isn’t there; wherever he’s gone, behind the shallow rise and fall of his breathing, is someplace where he can’t grab her back.

Sgt. Greer’s head jerks up as gunfire echoes out again, somewhere above them, where everyone else was going. “ _Shit,_ ” he says, and looks at his gun— then down at where he’s holding Amelia’s ruined jacket to Chloe’s dad’s abdomen. “Motherfuckers must be in the walls; how the hell did they— excuse my language.”

“Go,” Ms. Wray says. “I’m certified. I can stay till the med team gets here.”

He stares at her for a second, his dark eyes measuring, then nods. “I’ll leave you my radio,” he says. “Come here and take over for me.”

So she does. Chloe is peripherally aware of the transfer: the low murmur of voices and the choreography of their hands. Sgt. Greer places a radio on the ground next to her. She doesn’t look at him. He pauses like he wants to tell her something. But he doesn’t tell her anything. He just goes.

“It wasn’t his fault,” Ms. Wray says, when he’s gone. “He was left in charge of a group of unarmed civilians. Actually, he did exceptionally well. Or else we were exceptionally lucky. Or both.”

“I know it wasn’t his fault,” Chloe whispers.

She has her hand on her dad’s chest, right over his heart, so she can feel it beating. The beat of the heart is called an autonomic reflex. It’s something you don’t have to think about. Your body does it for you. One of those choices you don’t get to make, like whether or not you keep breathing, or how the blood moves through your circulatory system, or how you react when you hear gunshots. Some bodies want to put themselves in front of other people’s bodies. Other bodies want to scream and fold their hands over their heads. Some bodies want to save lives and other bodies have only one thought, only one thing in the world that they want to protect.

She has never before experienced the sensation of not wanting to be in her body so badly that she feels like she’s peeling away from her skin. Maybe she just wants to escape her nervous system, which she never knew was so defective— although maybe she’s always suspected it. Why else would she have felt like she does, like she did the night of her senior prom photo, wearing Ferragamo heels and a violet Vera Wang dress, with her early acceptance to Harvard on the refrigerator, and plans to volunteer teaching yoga to inner-city children at a YMCA summer camp, smiling at the camera with an orchid on her wrist and being struck by the sudden nauseating fear that when she looking at the picture she wouldn’t be there, or wouldn’t have a face, maybe, or that there’d just be a blur instead, because there was nothing inside her at all, nothing?

Nothing that a bullet wouldn’t go straight through.

“Is he going to die?” she asks Ms. Wray almost inaudibly.

Someone is still shooting a gun, above or below them. She wonders mechanically if it’s Sgt. Greer. She wonders if Sgt. Greer is still alive. She wonders if Lt. Scott is still alive. She wonders about Dr. Rush, and whether he is still on the base, or was, when the shooting started. She doesn’t think that Dr. Rush knows how to fire a gun.

Ms. Wray looks at her steadily. “I don’t know,” she says.

“He’s on a medication for his heart. A blood thinner.”

Ms. Wray’s eyes flicker downwards to where Chloe’s dad— Chloe knows this— has lost a lot of blood.

Amelia is still crying in the corner. Chloe wishes that she would stop crying.

Ms. Wray doesn’t say anything.

“Are we going to get shot?” Chloe asks.

“I don’t know,” Ms. Wray says.

“What if the med team gets shot?”

“They carry guns here. They’re not just medics.”

“People who carry guns get shot all the time,” Chloe says. “Do _you_ have a gun?”

“No,” Ms. Wray says.

“Have you done this before?”

She doesn’t know why she’s asking so many questions. She can’t stop. Maybe it’s an autonomic reflex.

Ms. Wray presses her lips together very precisely, like she’s holding a word inside her mouth, or a sentence. “Yes,” she says after a moment. “I’ve done something like this before.”

“You’ve held someone’s— you’ve had to sit there while someone—“ She doesn’t know what she’s trying to say. Her head is buzzing. Her mouth hurts. Her lips feel swollen. Without any warning her hand balls itself up into a fist and slams against the wall, which is a good reason to make a noise of pain, so she does, because it hurts, and she’s still sort of making that noise when she says, “Where is the _med team;_ where the fuck _are_ they?”

Ms. Wray shakes her head. She looks away, beyond the wavering circle of light, into the darkness.

“Chloe,” Amelia whispers. “You broke your tooth.”

Chloe stares at her, uncomprehending.

“Your—“ Amelia gestures.

Chloe reaches up and touches her front teeth: feels the sharp ridge where part of one is missing. It doesn’t hurt, or if it does, she doesn’t feel it. It’s just there: a piece of absence in place of her tooth. “I didn’t notice,” she says. “How could I not notice?”

Her mom will be angry. _I know you didn’t mean to,_ she always says when Chloe doesn’t notice something, _but it’s careless, Chloe. It makes you seem careless. Is that what you want people to think?_

Her dad sucks in a breath suddenly and coughs. His cough sounds like aquarium gravel.

Chloe grabs his hand.

Ms. Wray says, “Oh, God.”

There is blood in his mouth. His eyes are open, but only a little, and he looks at Chloe like he doesn’t know who she is.

“Dad?” she says. “Daddy?”

“Chloe, I need you to get on the radio and turn to channel three,” Ms. Wray says very rapidly. “Say this is India Oscar Alfa Nine One calling a Two Whiskey Three in the northeast stairwell, level fourteen, _priority._ ”

Chloe fumbles with the radio.

Her dad coughs again.

His breath keeps wheezing, like a car engine on a cold day when it doesn’t want to start.

“Repeat it,” Ms. Wray says, when Chloe has managed to force the shaky words out. “Say _repeat_ and repeat it.”

“Repeat,” Chloe says. She is holding the radio up to her face. Does she think this will make them hear her better? That they’ll see her, maybe: the blood on her mouth, her white face, her chipped tooth, and this will move them to action, a rhetorical technique the Greeks called _pathos_ , the art of persuasion through evoking emotion in the viewer, the listener, the radio operator, the med team, the general, in whoever it takes. But how can they see her when even she thinks there’s no her there to see? She wonders if they can even hear her voice.

“Please,” she says on the radio, high-pitched and frightened. “Please come.”

Ms. Wray isn’t holding the blazer down anymore. She’s putting her mouth over Chloe’s dad’s mouth, and then pressing her neat hands over his heart in the shape of an X. Chloe watches her, numb. It looks like some kind of witchcraft, that gesture: the image of the two mouths pushed together, the precision with which Ms. Wray positions her hands, like she can pump life back into Chloe’s dad from her own body, and when the door to the stairwell bursts open and the med team comes barreling through the smoke with a defibrillator at last, Chloe almost tries to stop them from reaching her dad for a second, because the spell isn’t finished, and if they stop Ms. Wray now, they’ll ruin everything. As long as Ms. Wray kneels there with her palms flat against Chloe’s dad’s chest, her lips forming secret syllables that Chloe can’t quite make out, there’s still a chance; there’s still something to be done; they’re stuck in a thin shining bubble of the possible that keeps expanding and expanding, getting thinner and brighter, but there is a finite area to that possible, it only has so much mass, and it can’t keep expanding forever, so what happens, what happens when the bubble—

* * *

They put her in the general’s office afterwards. Much later, when everyone has stopped shooting. She can’t stay in the infirmary, because too many people were wounded in the attack. A broken tooth and a split lip means she gets the emergency equivalent of a Band-Aid: some wet wipes and an ice pack and a curt reminder to call her dentist. But they don’t know what to do with her because her dad was important and is dead. There ought to be a protocol, probably, but she guesses there was once, when people still inherited titles. Then when your dad died your name might change. She knows because she reads mystery novels, old ones that make her seem sophisticated. If Lord Peter Wimsey’s brother died, for instance, he would have become Denver. That was in one of her books. She hasn’t inherited anything. Or maybe she has; probably she has; her dad never talked about his will with her. But right now, when it matters, she’s just gone from being Chloe Armstrong to The Dead Senator’s Daughter. The Daughter of the Senator Who Is Dead. And no one really seems to know what that means yet.

Amelia had to stay in the infirmary so they could clean out the gash in her arm where the bullet grazed her. So it is just Chloe in the office.

One of the overhead bulbs is buzzing and she doesn’t like it. All the smoke has been cleared out and the lights are bright again.

General Landry’s desk is very polished and shining.

She wonders how long she’s been here.

There’s nothing to do. There’s nothing to read that isn’t Top Secret.

An airman took away her phone because he had to “contain the incident.” It didn’t seem to occur to him to wonder what she would do. Maybe she’s not supposed to do anything. There isn’t a protocol for her either. Someone should write an article for the _New Yorker_ , she thinks, asking the important etiquette questions. “Is it impolite to lock the daughter of an important dead person in an office?” “Am I allowed to be bored when my dad is dead?”

She pulls her bare feet up into the chair where she’s sitting, and hugs her knees. They took away her clothes, too, because of contaminants, and gave her uniform clothes that are much too big. But they didn’t have the right size shoe for her. Only flip-flops.

She stares at her feet.

The light buzzes.

Her dad is dead.

Her tongue worries at the edge of her tooth. It doesn’t hurt. Not really.

The door opens finally, and Ms. Wray comes in.

She is also wearing uniform clothes and flip-flops. Maybe, Chloe thinks, they wear the same shoe size. That seems like it’s probably not important, but then again, you never know. How is she supposed to know anymore what might be important? She feels like she doesn’t know anything.

Ms. Wray watches her in silence for a minute before she takes a breath and says, “Chloe, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Chloe says, looking down at her toes. “I know you tried. You tried really hard. Everyone did.”

That’s what she’s supposed to say, so she might as well say it. It’s good practice, although she doesn’t know this yet, not really; nevertheless, she already suspects that there will be a lot of saying what she’s supposed to say in the future.

“Yes,” Ms. Wray says. “But I can still be sorry.”

Chloe nods and lets her chin rest on the tops of her knees. “I want to go home,” she says. “Can I go home?”

“Not yet.”

“Has anyone told my mom?”

“No. There’ll be a cover story.”

“They read her into the program.”

“Still,” Ms. Wray says. “Still.”

She’s been standing in the doorway, but now she crosses the room— shuffling in her flip-flops. It’s such an awkward walk for such an awfully self-assured person that Chloe feels herself smile and then has to bury her face in her folded arms, because that’s awful, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice muffled. “You just looked so— I mean, _flip-flops_.” She has never seen Ms. Wray wear anything other than perfectly polished Cuban heels.

Ms. Wray settles a light hand on her back. “It’s all right to laugh,” she says softly.

Chloe shakes her head without looking up. “But I don’t want to.”

“I know.” Ms. Wray doesn’t remove her hand. “Did they do something about your tooth in the infirmary?”

“They said that I— They said I should call a dentist.” Finally Chloe lifts her head, squinting at the light and surprised to find it watery. She blinks. “It doesn’t hurt, though.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“It seems like it should hurt.”

Ms. Wray smiles at her gently. Her eyes look red, like she’s been crying, too, although maybe it’s just from all the smoke. “You could leave it. Start a trend. You’d get a lot of attention.”

“Yes.” Chloe touches the tooth gingerly, its artificial incisor edge. It feels like an animal’s tooth. Not like it belongs in her body. She pulls her finger back and says, “I never asked if you were hurt.”

“I’m fine,” Ms. Wray says.

“I should have asked. I didn’t even wonder.”

“You had other things to worry about.”

Chloe shakes her head. She brings her hands up to tuck her hair behind her ears, then presses them flat, cradling her own skull, and holds them there. “I didn’t even ask,” she says. “Why didn’t I ask?”

“Chloe,” Ms. Wray says. “I’m not hurt.”

“Neither am I,” Chloe whispers.

Ms. Wray’s hand closes for a second in the rough cotton of Chloe’s uniform jacket, a quick motion like a sob or seizure that would be easy to miss. Her expression stays the same, even and placid. “That’s good, isn’t it?” she says again.

Their eyes meet.

“Yes,” Chloe says. “Of course. Of course it’s good.”


	15. The Good Earth

The world of the Tau’ri turns out to be possessed of an oxygen-rich atmosphere that tastes, upon Ginn’s tongue, like hydroponics labs and the overheated off-cycle components from an al’kesh and the smell when you put your face close to warm dirt. It is not an unpleasant taste, but the air is not what she is used to, and she tires easily as she and Young and Rush walk in a forested region alongside the road, which is not a road but a runway for very nimble four-wheeled land-ships that operate on loud and unsophisticated engines, and that signal to one another by emitting something that Rush refers to, in a disparaging tone of voice, as _country rock._

“Christ, I never realized; no wonder the Lucian Alliance want to destroy Earth, if their first impressions of it have been Colorado Springs and bloody Blake Shelton,” he says.

“Hey,” Young says. “Watch how you talk about the song of my people.”

“There is a tribal rivalry between you?” Ginn inquires, to which Young says, “No,” and Rush says, “There most certainly is.”

“America,” Young says. “Love it or leave it.”

Rush slants a very pointed look at him. “Oh, yes? And I’ll just leave it, shall I?”

Young sighs and does not respond. He pauses beside a tree and leans against it. He has been pausing a great deal because he is badly injured. He had lied in the security room when he said that he was not. Ginn does not know what the initial wound was, but she has worsened it, which she regrets. She acted only because she did not wish to die, and she did not wish to be locked in a closet, or to be locked in military prison, or to be locked in the cargo hold of a tel’tak, or to be locked in a broken sarcophagus, which was where she had been put as a child when she did not demonstrate her skills correctly, after the Alliance took her in. She does not have a horror of small spaces; after all, she has lived all her life in on ships and bases, barring the first few years she barely remembers, and the only thing more foreign to her than an atmosphere amenable to humans is the natural balance of gravity. But in that battered stone box, she had learned the lesson that the Alliance had meant to teach her, which was that her suffering was nothing to them: not even something to be snuffed out, but something to be muffled and forgotten until they found her useful once more. That she could beat her fists forever against a barrier that seemed, from her limited perspective, to be at the very center of her interstellar world, only to find when it was removed that it had been an afterthought to others. _Ah, I had forgotten she was there,_ Yar would say— Yar, who had been the right-hand man to Kiva’s father, Massim. _The little Bengedi; I had forgotten about her._ They called her the Bengedi because that was how her people were called.

It had been a very effective training. She appreciates its practical rigor from an abstract perspective. But she does not intend for it to be practiced upon her again.

Rush is watching Young narrow-eyed. He says, “My argument holds; we should simply have hijacked a car in the first place.”

“Oh, yeah?” Young says. “On _Norad Road?_ Great idea, Johnny Highwayman. We’d have half the cops in Colorado Springs out looking for us.”

“You’re not going to make it much further.”

“You just want to hijack a car.” Young shakes his head and pushes wet dark hair back from his face. “We should be right near the trailhead; there’ll be cars parked there, and no one’ll miss them for a good few hours, if we’re lucky.”

“Mm,” Rush says, sounding dissatisfied. But when Young straightens, ever-so-slightly less sickly-faced than before, Rush supports him once more without complaint.

They resume their course through what can only be a resource-rich region, where trees grow in an astonishing variety of colors and shapes, un-espaliered and loosing leaves all over in thick carpets. Small animals with twig-like feet scatter overhead, fat and charmingly anxious and capable of flight. Ginn watches them spread their dark wings against a sky that seems endless, very high and blue and far away.

“It’s so empty,” she says. “The sky. You have no ships?”

“Not a lot of ships,” Young says. “Mostly cars.”

“Cars is… ?”

He gestures as they enter a flat and stony region where a number of the land-ships are docked and depowered. “Cars. We go in for land travel more than air travel, as a rule. Guess that’s one more reason for you to sneer at the Tau’ri, right?”

“No,” Ginn says. She is still watching the curve of the sky. Empty, it looks like the inside of an eggshell, a clean and very peaceful place that she can imagine although she has only ever seen its obverse. “I like it.”

Varro would have liked it, she thinks.

* * *

Rush quickly achieves manual operation of one of the flightless vehicles, something that seems to strike Young as impressive, or possibly cause him alarm.

“Where the hell did you learn to do that?” Young asks.

“Vocational training,” Rush says.

“What the fuck kind of vocation were you training for that you learned how to _hotwire cars?_ ”

“Look,” Rush says. “Are you or are you not getting in?”

Young sits in the second tier of seats, indicating that Ginn ought to co-pilot the vehicle with Rush. “So I can keep an eye on her,” he says.

“What is she going do, play Top 40 Radio at me?” Rush engages the engine of the vehicle, and they exit rapidly onto the road.

“She’s armed,” Young says.

“She could’ve shot me in the Mountain. Or in the forest, for the matter. Or in that parking lot. Fat lot of good you’d be; I’m surprised you don’t have vultures circling around you. Frankly, I’m astonished we haven’t all attracted an animal legion by now, soaked as we are in a melange of our own and other people’s blood— which reminds me; you ought to rid yourself of those trackers.”

Young had insisted, immediately after exiting the base, that he and Rush cut small mechanical trackers out from under their skin. Ginn had watched, fascinated, as their short knife slid into flesh and blood ran out in smooth ribbons. Rush had ripped the sleeves off his shirt to make bandages with. _You don’t have anything, a tracker or something, do you?_ Young had asked. _No,_ she’d said. He’d said, _How do they make sure you’re going to come back, then?_ Ginn had not understood the question at first, and then she had not known how to phrase her answer. She had tilted her head and looked at him. _They make sure_ , she’d said.

Now Young engineers the retraction of one of the viewscreens that line the vehicle and flings the metal trackers into the woodland. “Well,” he says, watching as their airborne parabola gleams in the strangely white light of a natural sun, “let ‘em try to trace that, if they want. Hopefully we won’t have to worry about it.”

Rush glances back at him. “Which direction am I meant to be heading in?” he asks.

Young is silent for a moment. “South,” he says at last. “South is good. South on eye twenty-five.”

Rush is then silent for a duration proportional to Young’s silence, or even perhaps exceeding it. He says, “New Mexico is south of here.”

“Yup.”

“David’s from New Mexico.”

“…Yup,” Young says, after a greater-again duration of silence. “We were stationed there together.”

“Do you think—“ Rush’s mouth forms a thin line. “Cryptographically speaking, when one is attempting to conceal information, one generally aims to produce as convincing as possible an impression of randomness. In this case, the information we wish to conceal is, obviously, our location. Therefore perhaps we ought to—“

Young says, “I know what the fucking information we’re attempting to conceal is.”

Rush’s mouth tightens further. “Then I would respectfully suggest that you rethink the latitude that you’re allowing your emotional fucking impulses, if you—“

“Jesus Christ. Fine!” Young throws his hands in the air. “Drive north, then. East. West. I don’t give a fuck.”

Rush says nothing. He directs the vehicle down a long stretch of road that lies between red boulders. The shadow of mountains in the distance suggests a size and scale of this world’s greenness that Ginn could not have imagined. She presses her face to the nearest viewscreen as though she might penetrate it with her body and escape the tension in the so-called _car_ , vanishing into the unthinkable Tau’ri green. She watches as a soundless ship crosses the sky, shaped like one of the animals in the forest— wings and a tailfeather, an odd and pleasingly whimsical design.

“They sent him back through the gate,” Young says. He too is gazing through a viewscreen. His hand moves restlessly through the sweat-flat curls of his hair, to no apparent rational purpose. “ _Her_ people. With the rest of SG-3. As bait. Human bait. So, you know. He’s alive. Or he was. If you care about that sort of thing.”

Ginn registers peripheral movement: Rush’s hands tightening around the car’s navigational control wheel. “And he lied to me,” Rush says flatly. “If _you_ care about _that_ sort of thing. But then, perhaps you lied to me as well.”

Young makes a frustrated sound. “Oh, big deal, so he didn’t tell you that you came genetically equipped to turn on some Ancient fucking lightbulbs, like half the guys they send to Atlantis; he let you think he was more into your numbercrunching than he was. I mean, he should definitely die for that; let’s just let the Lucian Alliance have him!”

“So you did know,” Rush says. His voice lacks any emotional signifier.

“ _No_ , I didn’t know; you think they tell me this shit? Landry and O’Neill told me this morning; they wanted me to take over the project, the— whatever the hell David was doing, that he needed you for, with the Icarus planet and the nine chevron address.”

Rush is silent.

Ginn strives for invisibility within the contours of her soporifically comfortable seat. She has an intuition that—

Rush glances at her. He has, she has observed, very unsettling eyes; perhaps if he had not, or if he had never turned them upon her, or if it had not been he who had sat in the rotatable chair of the Stargate security station, whom Ginn had touched with the symmetrical muzzle of Young’s heavy Tau’ri gun, then she would not be in this car, moving fast through the variegated mountains of the place that the Tau’ri call _Earth._ But he had caused her to feel an imbalance when he looked at her, as though through this seemingly ordinary act he had effected a resection, removed part of her anatomy and inspected it more closely than she was prepared for.

“That he needed me for,” Rush says to her. “That _your_ people need me for. But not because of what Colonel Young, who is given to anti-intellectual outbursts, might refer to as my numbercrunching.”

“I don’t know this word, _numbercrunching,_ ” Ginn says, although she can intuit its denotation.

“Please. You can train yourself to operate a computer from the ground up and hack a U.S. government installation, but you can’t make a simple conversational inference? You’re not that stupid. There’s a reason you filled the base with that smoke. What is it?”

Ginn looks down at her hands. There is blood under her fingernails. It has dried and turned flaky, as blood does. She says, “Kiva— she governs the Western Principality of Sixth House— sought individuals with a specific set of genetic markers derived from the lineage of the ones you call Ancients. She believes that it will not be possible to dial the ninth chevron without making use of such a person, or that it will not be possible to use whatever weapon lies beyond it. The smoke was used to indicate those who possessed one or more of these genetic markers, so that we might appropriate them.”

“ _Appropriate_ them?” Young says, just as Rush says, sharply, “What do you mean, _making use_ of such a person?”

Mutely, Ginn shakes her head.

“You must know more than that,” Rush says very intensely. “There were others? Others at the Mountain? Others who reacted to the smoke?”

Ginn nods. She stares at where she is still worrying at the tip of one finger. She wishes that she had been equipped with a knife, so that she could extract the flecks of blood from under the nail. “We were told the Tau’ri had gathered them there for the same purpose. Not many. A few. The inheritance is rare.”

“Who the hell told you that?” Young demands. “And what _genetic markers_ are we talking about, exactly? ATA’s not common, but it’s not what I’d call rare. And I don’t know about any other Ancient genes, so if someone’s been feeding you a line about—“

“I don’t know this expression, _feeding a line_ ,” Ginn says. Her voice sounds fretful, which she had not intended. She keeps working at the edge of her nail. The blood is there; she can see it. Like a line of ink. Varro’s blood. She is certain there is a cogent reason why it should produce a greater experience of revulsion in her, these tiny flakes she cannot get away from her skin, than the glossy patches that stiffen her clothing. “I don’t know the genetic markers. I don’t know the identity of the Tau’ri source. I don’t know. I don’t _know._ ”

“Then what the hell good are you?” Young snaps.

There is a silence.

“ATS,” Rush says in a low voice. “And UAT. Those are the other two genes.”

“What—“ Young starts.

“I was informed that it was in my best interests to read my medical file. Your friend Mitchell was oh-so-concerned that I might leak it to the Lucians _après_ my inevitable capture, but it would seem that, to no great surprise on my part, his fears were absent any real basis, as the Lucians had already—“

He breaks off his sentence. His mouth works.

Silence spreads throughout the vehicle like a lukewarm gust of recirculated air.

“Hotshot—” Young begins.

The car departs abruptly from its trajectory as though veering onto a tangent vector. The vehicle’s mechanical elements protest through a smell of burning and a squeal as Rush kills the forward velocity and jolts them to a stop atop a fractious bed of gravel.

“Don’t,” Rush says, breathing hard, “ _call me that._ ”

Ginn had gripped the sides of her seat in that first lurching moment of terror. But when she feels the vehicle slow and grunt to a rest, she gropes for her gun. She charges it with a flick of her thumb and levels it at Rush.

She herself, she notices peripherally, is breathing very fast.

“Oh, what the fuck is it now?” Rush demands, turning on her. “Was one unnecessary and hyperbolic performance of menace not enough to shore up your fragile sense of self-security? Yes, you’re very scary; we’re all frightened of you. Now put that thing away before you take someone’s eye out.”

“Rush,” Young says in an undertone, “maybe you should—“

“What? I should _what?_ ” Rush rounds on him, throwing a fierce and scornful look over the functionless panel that divides the seats. “Make nice with her? That would be _your_ strategy, wouldn’t it? Make nice with anyone that might be a threat, up until you start to find the effort tiresome, and decide to chuck it in a dungeon— the patented approach of Stargate Command.”

“That wasn’t—“

“At least _she_ had the decency to skel’ me in the fucking face outright, rather than sitting in my fucking parlor listening to music while plotting how to give me the chiv, or whatever the fuck it is _you’ve_ been playing at!” Rush’s voice is rising. “So you’ll forgive me if the Lucian Alliance is looking a mite more appealing at the moment than the tender duplicities of your Kafkaesque fucking— Foucauldian fucking biopolitical nightmare!”

Ginn does not understand Rush’s words. But she does not need to understand them. She knows their content by the volume and timbre of his voice, or rather she knows that the content is inconsequential. There is a certain pitch of mechanical alarm at which the nature of the failure that has occurred within the circuitry of a tel’tak is no longer of importance; _run_ is the only semantic content of that alarm. She has learned, too, this message from Yar and Massim and Kiva, that there exists a variant of such a mechanical alarm that the human body emits, sometimes as noise, and sometimes as a more subtle disturbance. The man who lives is the man who has tuned himself to receive all broadcasts on this spectrum, and who therefore is the first to know when it is time to run.

She has backed her whole body against the door, tense and vibrating as though she too seeks to broadcast a warning on that spectrum. “Stop shouting!” she says in a too-high and too-frightened voice. “Stop shouting and resume the operation of this vehicle, or I will shoot you!”

This does not have the effect she had predicted. Rush redirects his fury from Young to her. “Perhaps instead of _shooting_ me, which would leave you without a functional driver once Young, having managed to mangle himself like an idiot, succumbs to his wounds at last, you should consider sharing with me what the _fuck_ you meant when you said that the Lucian Alliance intended to _make use of such a person.”_

Ginn flattens herself further against the door. She does not know if she can operate the locking mechanism, but she can, she thinks, put her head through the glass, which might cut her throat, but equally might offer an alternative mode of escaping. She does not need Rush; he is wrong. He had briefly been useful. But Varro had also been useful, and when he was gone—

Nausea equivalent to a 2G deceleration grips the very center of her chest.

When he was gone she had picked up his gun and she had engineered her defection. So he had not been so very essential. It had been a mistake for her to think that he was.

“What did you mean?” Rush says again. His eyes are hard and his voice is as flat and cold as a trinium gearwheel.

“I—“ Ginn says.

She gropes for the handle of the door.

“What did you mean, _make use_?”

“Rush,” Young says in a low voice. “She’s—“

Ginn manages to get the door open at an interval exactly sufficient for her to stumble out of the car and vomit at the side of the road.

She is conscious then only of the force of her own retching and the taste of bile at the back of her throat. The air hurts to breathe, and the planetary gravity weighs her down, not a lot, not even enough really to notice, but enough that her knees are beginning to hurt. She sobs once, although she is not crying. She wipes her mouth with the back of the hand that holds the gun. She hates Earth, she thinks. She hates it. She doesn’t care that it’s green. She wishes she were back in space.

 _No_ native planet? Varro had said once, and she had said, I was a child the last time I saw it. It’s easier to think I don’t have one. Space is good. Space is… clean. —Cold, he’d said, and she’d said, Cold things are clean.

Varro had missed his native planet. He’d had a wife there, who died. They had not had any children. He had regretted that. Now, though, he’d said, now I get to babysit a whole load of you science brains. You’re all like children. As bad as children, anyway.

But she had known that she was the only one he thought of as his child.

A car door slams, and she flinches, bringing the gun unsteadily up.

She can hear Rush and Young arguing, though she cannot make out the substance of their argument. “—as though I need interpersonal advice from—“ Rush says, and then, “ _Strategic?_ Do they teach a special class, social etiquette with the aim of manipulation? You can go—“ before he hits the roof of the car with his hands and says, in a defeated voice, “Yes. You’ve said. Repeatedly. Yes. Just— give me a moment.”

He makes his way around the foresection of the vehicle. Ginn trains the weapon on him, but he shows her his hands.

“I’m not armed,” he says. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She watches him warily and doesn’t alter her position.

“Just came out here to have a cigarette.” He pulls a small box out of his blazer pocket and jars a stick loose from it. “It’s a dreadful habit; my—“ There is a slight lapse in his speech. “My wife used to say that I turned into a feral cat when I went without one too long.”

“I don’t know what is a cigarette,” Ginn says.

Rush creates a flame with a small mechanical device and applies it to the end of the stick. “Probably for the best, really, that you don’t.”

“It makes you shout?”

“Well, the absence of it doesn’t help.” He breathes from the stick and exhales a cloud of cold-breath-colored smoke. “And there are what one might describe a host of other implicated factors, which, if you were familiar with Latin, would be quite a subtle pun.”

Ginn lowers her gun somewhat reluctantly. The sense of alarm is no longer troubling her body. She feels better now that she has thrown up.

Rush looks down and scuffs one shoe against the gravel. “How old are you?” he asks after a moment.

She shakes her head.

He quirks an eyebrow.

“I don’t know,” she says. “My homeworld does not mark circuital time in the same manner as yours. I remember five harvests before the Alliance came.”

Rush nods without looking up. “They came,” he says, “and they _made use_ of you, did they?”

“They trained me. It is a great gift, education. It is not given to girls on the world that I came from.” She does not know why she feels so stirred to defend the Alliance, who taught her to kill and be fearful, who taught her to torture and be tortured and to be ashamed. But she does feel this. She says defiantly, “Better than being the wife of a farmer.”

Rush nods again. “Instead they gave you computers, and told you to learn how they worked, without any manuals.”

“Yes.”

“And you did.”

“Yes.”

“You speak English.”

“The computers speak English.”

“You speak better English than a computer.”

“I have a gift for languages,” she says. This is not boastful; it is the truth. “And for mathematics. That is why they educated me. They do tests. They take you away from your home if you’re clever. If you’re _really_ clever.”

Rush stares down at his cigarette, burning unheeded in his hand. He says quietly. “Of course they do.”

“I didn’t mind,” Ginn says. “Not— not really. I don’t know who I would have been, if they hadn’t. But in the end I—“ She turns her head, biting her lip. “You have to survive, don’t you? I mean. Before you can do anything else. Be anything else. You have to survive. No matter what it takes. And your men shot Varro.”

“He was the man in the hallway?”

She nods and swallows hard so she can keep breathing. “He was the one who protected me.”

“I should just think you can protect yourself,” Rush says mildly, without any particular tone of judgement.

“Yes,” Ginn says. “I know that now. But— it was nice to have someone else who did.”

She has to holster her gun, then, so she can cover her face with both hands, _not_ because she is crying, but because perhaps she _could_ be crying, if she still remembered how the process worked, and she cannot tolerate this fact being known and seen.

“Oh,” Rush says, sounding vaguely alarmed. “No, don’t— Perhaps you should have a cigarette after all.”

He extends the box to her. She can see it through the spaces of her fingers, blurry-eyed.

“Rush!” Young snaps. He has retracted the viewscreen, as Ginn observes when she lowers her hands, and is leaning out of the space thus created.

“What?” Rush says, sounding resentful.

“What the hell is wrong with you? You can’t give her _cigarettes!_ ”

“I am _trying_ ,” Rush says through gritted teeth, “to conduct an _interpersonal transaction._ ”

“Yeah, well, unsurprisingly, it seems like that’s not exactly your wheelhouse, so maybe just get back in the fucking car instead?”

Rush glares at him and tosses his own cigarette down upon the gravel, extinguishing the end of it that is still burning with the heel of his boot.

“It’s all right,” Ginn whispers. “I didn’t want one anyway.”

He puts the box into his pocket and folds his arms across his chest. “ _He_ didn’t want to bring you along in the first place, if you’ll remember.”

“Yes,” Ginn says. “But you did.” She tilts her head, scrutinizing the refraction of light from the wire-and-glass facial ornaments that he wears. Outdoors, it is difficult to perceive his expression behind the lenses, which is perhaps the ornaments’ purpose. “Why did you?”

Rush shrugs and rakes his hair back.

“You evaluated my code. Was this sufficient as a test?”

“ _No,_ ” he says, too fast. “No, that’s not— That didn’t factor into my decision.”

“But you believe that I may be of use.”

“I’m sure it would accomplish a great deal in terms of soothing Colonel Young’s sorer feelings if you were. But perhaps for now we ought to focus on staying alive long enough that it matters.”

Ginn nods. “You wish to resume traveling towards the twenty-fifth eye. I understand.”

Rush frowns, and then his mouth twitches. “Yes, well, we may find ourselves opting for the seventieth eye instead. Either way, I’d just as soon not have to drive the mountains after nightfall.”

“Nightfall.” The idea is strange to her. She looks up through the fronded branches that overhang the roadway, at the glinting sun and the particulate masses that hang in the planetary atmosphere. There is water flowing nearby; she can hear its exuberant splashing. A memory activates suddenly, unbidden: plunging under the water and holding her breath. She was a child. She wanted to see if she could reach the bottom, where smooth stones and the shells of freshwater molluscs tended to collect. She thought that there must be life under the river, animals that moved where she couldn’t see. She sensed that other dimensions would soon be necessary for her expansion, that she was not made like other creatures on land, but she did not know where to look to find these spaces. And she could not hold her breath long enough. She had to surface; her eyes streamed. _Little fool_ , her brother said scornfully from the bank. _You’ll drown._ She spit pondweed, gasping. It tasted of the places she couldn’t imagine yet.

Rush regards her questioningly. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” she says. She swallows. “It’s beautiful here.”

He looks away. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking all of Earth is like this. It isn’t.”

“I suppose,” she says, “that I will have to see for myself.”

Rush opens the door for her when she steps towards the car, saving her a struggle with the handle. “You should take your coat off,” he says. “You can wear my blazer.”

She looks at him.

He elaborates, “You’re covered in blood.”

It is true. She touches a stain self-consciously, and with some sadness. Its area is bigger than her hand. She has an absurd impulse to cling to the overtunic in spite of its condition, or, no— if she is honest, because of it. But the blood has ceased to perform its biological function. It cannot be put back into the body; a body once thus divided cannot recohere; the process cannot be reversed. She strips the overtunic off. There is blood on the shirt beneath it, but not as much. Rush’s blazer, when he hands it to her and she shrugs it on, is made of fine woven fabric. A civilian’s fabric. Not suitable for war. She smooths her hands down the front of it, uncertain how to feel about the garment. About the fabric. About the gesture.

“Thank you,” she says. She feels shy, as though she had not put on as many clothes as she had removed.

Rush clears his throat. “I believe we can consign this reprehensible piece of space-antelope skin to the backseat, where it clearly belongs.”

“Thanks,” Young says dryly. He catches the overtunic when Rush throws it at him. “Nice to know where I stand in the scheme of things.”

Rush ignores him and starts to turn, to shut the door. Ginn catches the pale skin of his wrist.

“I,” she says. “I would tell you if I knew. What they wanted you for. I would tell you.”

He studies her. “Why?” he asks at last. “You’ve no reason to.”

“Because,” she says, feeling foolish. She hunches her shoulders and pushes her hands into the blazer pockets. The inside of the pockets is lined with silk. She knows silk; one of Kiva’s men brought some back for his woman, a scarf in a dark red color Ginn could hardly believe was real. The lining under her fingertips is extravagant, costly, a supererogatory pleasure that no observer would know is there. An extra dimension, she thinks, but not the one she had expected.

“Because,” she says again haltingly. “It’s beautiful here.”


	16. Chapter 16

Rush had hoped not to have to drive at night in the mountains, but in fact the sun had well and truly set by the time the gas light asserted its ghostly pictographic presence.

“We might as well stop now,” Young said wearily, when this fact was pointed out to him.

They were on the far outskirts of a town called— unsurprisingly, Rush thought with a swell of disdain— Rifle, and had passed through ski country at a decent pace, following the highway through a landscape marked by country clubs and pine trees of a shape and height that Rush had previously believed to exist only in fairy tale books. He had grown sleepy at one point and had opened the driver’s side window of the smug stolen Volvo sedan, only to be confronted by air a magnitude colder than that he’d breathed while trying to convince the Lucian girl not to shoot him, air that smelled of nothing, as though it had been newly created that morning and had not acquired the clutching fingerprints of earth’s organic life forms yet. _Smells like home_ , Young had said unexpectedly from the back seat. _Where I grew up._ Rush had glanced at him in the rear view mirror. _Wyoming?_ he’d asked. Young had nodded. _In the shadow of the mountains,_ he’d said.

There had seemed to be a profound and elusive quality to his voice, something that hinted at greater depth than his words allowed for, or, indeed, than his intellectual capacity might suggest. But Rush had not asked, and Young, ensconced in the darker edge of late evening’s chiaroscuro palette, had opted to say nothing more. Eventually they had passed beyond a point at which the mountains became mesas, and another at which the mesas turned to farmland. Now uneven terrain hinted at some new upset in I-70’s future, but Rush could not make out what sort it was going to be yet.

“We should stop for the night,” he said after a short silence. “And boost another car from the motel lot in the morning.”

“Yeah, all right,” Young said. His weariness seemed to be verging now on defeated. “Aim for someplace right by a travel plaza, if you can; I’m gonna want to use a pay phone.”

“Yes,” Rush said. He searched for something else to say, but found that nothing came immediately to mind.

For the length of time that it had taken the Earth to spin this strip of land into an outward-facing position and send the sun’s visible circle below the western mountain ridge, he had been convinced— not without a certain degree of smugness— that he was engaged in what Young would no doubt call _coping_ , or rather that there was in fact nothing to cope _with_. A wee bit of violence— well, he’d seen it in the East End of Glasgow, hadn’t he? A woman’s screams leaking down from the flat above like cold and sour-tasting tap water; football hooligans after a match; the bailiff’s boys, who’d carry a cricket bat round the estate; and the schoolboys, who hadn’t needed bats, who’d used their fists and feet and bricks from the decomposing reliquiae of the factories. And then there had been— So violence was not a novel concept to him. Neither was his own alienness. He had known; he had _always_ known; he had been told—

But for the last hundred miles or so, he had found that when he blinked, he saw for an instant, on the insides of his eyelids, the image of the loose hand of the Lucian corpse. The more he looked at it, the more he thought that there was something in the hand that was reminiscent of an Old Master, perhaps in Caravaggio’s _Entombment_ or one of the Depositions from the Cross. Well, after all: quite likely they’d learnt to paint from corpses, the Old Masters; hadn’t they? Studies in anatomy. How often had he gazed at a painting— Gloria had loved art; on their honeymoon she’d dragged him to museum after museum, astonished by his ignorance, yet invigorated by it also; _Have you really never—_ she’d said, and he had said, _Why would I ever,_ and she had said, _Because it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful, see—_

How often had it been a dead hand that he’d admired? Objectively an interesting question.

He blinked, and there it was again. Just the hand, falling limply against the concrete. He had trouble thinking of it as part of a body.

He tried to focus on the taillights of cars smearing red through the darkness, or the over-bright specks of neon that promised petrol stations ahead— gas stations, truck stops, travel plazas, however the fuck they’d been rebranded.

“We’re pretty close to Grand Junction,” Young said. “That’ll help. Bigger is better. More anonymous.”

Rush nodded, only half paying attention.

He considered opening the window again, but the air would smell of exhaust, which was undesirable. And it would wake the girl, Ginn, who was asleep in the seat next to him. She had grown briefly carsick when they first embarked upon the curves of the Rockies, and then had pulled her knees up to her chest, let her head list against the window, and dozed off within seconds.

Meditatively, he brought his hand up to the small wound at his mouth, which she had inflicted. He wondered how badly his response had betrayed that this was not that particular blow’s first repetition, its virgin enactment upon him. There were instincts one developed, a way of moving that came from the hindbrain, and which the body could not control. He knew it when he saw it in others. He had never explored the potential complementarity of the insight. But then, Young was a soldier; he lived in a world in which it was taken for granted that people got hit.

“She didn’t give you a concussion, did she?” Young asked.

Unnerved— he hadn’t known Young was watching— Rush flicked a glance at the mirror. “No.”

“Cause it’s hard to tell, sometimes, and you probably shouldn’t be driving if she did.”

“I know what a bloody concussion feels like, all right.”

He could feel Young’s eyes on him. “Right,” Young said. Then, after a pause: “Pull off up here. The place by the Exxon. That should be perfect.”

So Rush took the exit, steering the car towards the glum and pretensionless block of building that declared itself a Days Inn. It had a large sign, brightly lit, featuring a stylised and unconvincing sunrise. The sign seemed nervous somehow, like all the lights did— the lights that clustered around these thready little freeway interchanges, uneasy of the maw formed by the West’s dense and swallowing dark.

He blinked and saw the hand flopping against the concrete landing. Such an inelegant word, _flopping_. But it was what the hand had done. Did. Perhaps it was intended to be onomatopoeic, flopping. But that wasn’t the noise the hand had made.

His tongue probed the place on his mouth where the girl had struck him. He could taste blood on the inside of his lip.

* * *

They decided that it was Young who would rent the room, being the least conspicuous of the three of them and therefore the one whom a motel clerk was likeliest to forget. He stripped off his jacket first, so as not to stand out as a serviceman, handed it to Rush, and rubbed his curly hair where it was frayed by the desert wind. With the wound on his arm where he’d taken the tracker out bandaged and hidden by the egg-blue cloth of his shirt, he could almost pass for a businessman caught out on the road between cities. There was nothing to do, of course, about the limp, but perhaps the businessman had been in a very bad accident. Perhaps he had almost died and now remembered the incident with a certain amount of bemusement, unable to incorporate it in the narrative of his life, as one who had seen a meteor pass through Earth’s higher atmospheric layers, burning steadily, and exit, leaving a graze of smoke; who had briefly been troubled by this brush with a world full of objects that were not like him, the vast and alien landscapes of the galaxy, but who soon did not think of it any longer.

Rush shut his eyes and saw the dead hand.

When he opened them, Young was studying him. Young had slightly tilted his head, and the shadows from the parking lot’s fluorescent light struck him at a new angle. He no longer looked like a businessman.

“Are you okay?” Young asked.

“Adopt the attitude of a very amiable idiot,” Rush advised him with a certain amount of weariness, leaning against the car door. “You look too dangerous.”

“Thanks; I’ll keep that in mind.” Young folded his arms. “Are you okay?”

“Are _you_ okay?” Rush returned, gesturing at Young’s entire state of embodiment, his whole embodiment situation.

“Are _you_ okay?”

“Are _you—_ “

“I asked you first.”

Rush looked away. “Yes. I’m fine.”

Young shook his head. “I don’t know why I bother asking.”

“I admit, it’s a mystery to me as well.”

“Just— stay here till I get back and don’t _do_ anything, okay?” Young pointed at him and attempted a smile, one that faltered before reaching fruition. “ _Especially_ don’t do anything to my coat.”

Rush watched him limp his awful and offensive limp towards the motel entrance. It gave him a pang to see Young go, and he did not know why, and that too was awful and offensive. Quite probably it was trauma bonding of some sort. His body thought it needed Young for its survival. Soon it would awaken to the reality, no doubt, that Young was barely able to save himself, much less anyone else who became caught in the crossfire, and the impulse to call out and stop him from going too far would fade.

Though perhaps it was Young who was caught in the crossfire.

It was not useful to embark upon a survey of the crossfire, triangulating the names, affiliations, and purposes of the participants, because he possessed so little in the way of information. The hail of bullets might have come, like the meteor of which he’d been thinking, or more appropriately a whole meteor shower, from somewhere far beyond the Earth, propelled by forces millions of years in the making, though sometimes triggered by gravitational perturbations so minute that it seemed nonsensical to assign any agency to them. And in that case his own genes, surely, must form part of the calculations.

He held his hand up in front of his face and formed a fist.

He felt he could feel the collective gravity of the chromosomes. His whole body, drawing fatal things to it. Forcing them into alignment.

He shut his eyes and let his hand drop. It blurred into the image of the dead hand.

Unexpectedly and without any real examination of the impulse, he folded Young’s coat over the roof of the car and laid his head against it. The cloth was cheap and almost certainly artificial. It smelt human, like starch and sour sweat. He felt ill. He wished he had not given his blazer to the girl. It had his cigarettes in the pocket. He turned his face, pressed his mouth against Young’s coat and inhaled.

Young’s shuffling step warned him of the man’s incipient return, and he straightened before Young could see him.

“Hey,” Young said as he drew close, looking tired but remarkably genial for a man whom Rush had earlier witnessed kill several other men. “I got us a room. Ground floor. Tactically better. There’s even a continental breakfast, though I think people are going to look at you funny if you grate your eggs.”

Rush snatched a proffered keycard from his outstretched hand. “We’re not on a _road trip_ ,” he hissed, abruptly and inexplicably angered by the mere fact of Young’s presence, which so recently had seemed desirable to him. “I’m not in a _buddy comedy_ with you.”

The geniality dropped from Young’s face. It left behind an empty mask that just looked tired. “I know,” he said. Something in his inflection suggested that there ought to be more to the sentiment. But he added nothing more. The words simply hung there for a moment, before Young cleared his throat and looked away. “Maybe you should, uh, wake the girl up. I figure we ought to head over to the truck stop. You and her can pick out some food while I call Mitchell.”

“Yes, fine,” Rush said tightly. But he didn’t move. He stood, fidgeting, torn between the constituent members of an asterismic set of impulses whose pattern resisted interpretation. Once more the invisible gravity of all these goddamn parts.

Eventually he thrust Young’s coat out with a faint noise of irritation. “You look fucking absurd wearing so many ribbons,” he said. “A right clown.”

He stalked around the front of the car to tap on Ginn’s window, catching— as brief and fast as the flicker of moth’s wings under the car park light’s cone of radiance— the expression of compassion that crossed Young’s face as he did.

* * *

They crossed the deserted road that separated the motel from the travel plaza, an unlikely trio: Young, having left his uniform coat in the motel room, playing the businessman once again, Ginn wearing Rush’s blazer awkwardly draped over all her leather, Rush stripped of his ruined button-down and no doubt resembling a methamphetamine addict in his jeans and undershirt.

Ginn hadn’t known how to fasten the buttons of the blazer, and Rush had had to show her in the motel room. “It seems like a very primitive form of affixment,” she’d said, studying herself in the mirror. “We’ll pick up some clothes at the gas station,” Young had said, to which Rush had replied acerbically, “Ah, yes. Your staple: souvenir t-shirts.”

But there was something familiar about the offensiveness inherent in the aesthetic of the racks of shirts, when they entered the shopping center. Wolves and buffalo peered out from bad tie-dye jobs; Christian verses, taken out of context, adorned images of mountains and lightning. They were all dreadful, even those that merely advertised the state of Colorado; their dreadfulness made them seem unthreatening in a way that the truly ordinary could be when one had been confronted with the frightening elsewhere that lay outside it, the raw universe’s unpredictability. Rush felt a sort of kindness towards the stupid shirts that he had not expected, and considered, briefly and with real seriousness, whether it was the day’s most intolerable side effect.

“What is it?” Ginn asked, sounding dubious, when she had made her way down the row of clothing. She was fingering a purple t-shirt with a snow-laden buffalo lumbering across it.

“A buffalo,” Rush said. He had been assigned to mind her while Young made his phone call. “A type of animal.”

“I like it,” she said. “It lives here?”

“No. Not any longer. The Americans killed them all. Or most of them.”

She tilted her head, considering this. “Young is an American?”

“Yes.”

“Has he killed many buffalos?”

Rush huffed a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh. “Perhaps you should ask him that question.”

“Well,” Ginn said, frowning with a hint of petulance. “I will.”

“Buy the shirt, if you like it. You need a new one.”

She picked out that one, and a shirt that featured several eagles flying against a full moon, and a pair of pink track pants, though— “These are inappropriate for battle,” she said disapprovingly, holding them up.

“Oh, I don’t know. They might supply an advantage. They’d certainly be very startling to your enemy.” Rush wandered away from the display of clothes.

The fluorescent overhead lights were beginning to give him a headache, and the faintly piped, preprocessed sound of Christian pop music was distressing. He felt detached from reality. Eating something would, no doubt, be beneficial, but he thought that if he ate something he would vomit. Not for the first time, he wished that his body were more bloody efficient, instead of an assemblage made from warring parts; a machine at least had one objective; a machine was manufactured for a purpose; a machine was not outstandingly incompatible clusters of sentience and electrical impulses and bacteria in symbiosis with nominally human flesh, all attempting to function in circumstances that were not what they had wanted, inasmuch as they could be said to want anything, those brainless and therefore inaccessible accessory elements; jellyfish parts of an unjellyfish-like person, and he wished, he wished that he could—

Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he spun around to see Young there, grinning stupidly.

“Hey,” Young said.

“ _What?_ ” Rush snapped.

The grin dimmed, but only by a lumen. “I found you a sweatshirt.” Young produced, from behind his back, a sweatshirt emblazoned with the image of an articulated lorry and the slogan STOP ASKING WHY I’M AN ASSHOLE, I DON’T ASK WHY YOU’RE SO STUPID.

Rush stared at it. “Elucidate for me,” he said, when he found himself no longer dumbstruck, “the point of association between intelligence and”— he searched for the American term— “ _big rigs?_ ”

Young shrugged.

“I do ask why you’re so stupid. Frequently.”

“Yeah, but you use fancier language. I’m buying it for you.”

“Please don’t.”

“It’s happening.” Young threw the sweatshirt over his shoulder. “Where’s the kid?”

Ginn, clutching her selection of clothes and a large bag of what appeared to be trail mix, was staring in fascination— her head tilted, brow furrowed— at the hot dogs spinning in the gas station’s roller grill.

“You haven’t mentioned what you learned from Mitchell,” Rush said as he and Young made their way over to her.

Young, who had not looked weary for a moment, suddenly did. He grimaced, and raked a hand through his hair. But he said, “It’s good news. I’ll tell you when we’re outside.”

“I struggle to imagine an iteration of said conversation that contains _good news_.”

Young ignored him. “I’m starving, are you starving? And that Subway’s still open. I’m gonna grab a six-pack of three-two beer and a meatball sub.”

“Enjoy puking your guts up all night,” Rush said icily. “Is that plain enough language?” The two of them had reached Ginn; she turned at their approach, and he said to her, “Don’t eat anything that Colonel Young attempts to convince you is food. I’ll have my cigarettes now, please.”

She handed them over, looking confused and a little wary of Young.

“Right,” Rush bit out. “I’m going to smoke.”

He plucked a lighter from the cardboard display on the counter as he left; when the clerk called after him in a bemused tone of voice, “Uh, sir? You have to pay for that,” he shot back, without turning, “Feel free to add it to their tab.”

* * *

Outside, he shivered in his undershirt and smoked ferociously, watching an unappealing stream of American vehicles come and go through the false daylight of the forecourt. He didn’t understand his agitation, or why it increased as he observed the imbecilic expressions of young families, weathered truck drivers, and bronzed sorority girls: the population making their way westward from Denver, happy pioneers reiterating the footsteps of their ancestors. Rush wanted to say to them, spitefully, _Good luck! Avoid eating each other when you reach the next round of mountains!_ But such a sentiment was, almost certainly, unfair.

Perhaps it was the music. He did not like music, and hidden speakers seemed to be projecting it from every pump.

He wished that there were not so much light pollution. He would have liked to have seen the stars. One was meant to be able to see the stars, this far from civilisation.

He exhaled in a cloud, startling a thread-legged insect that had strayed too close to the truck stop’s doorway. The sight reminded him of the Lucian Alliance’s smoke, and he found himself flexing and then closing his fingers, as though to reassure himself that the appendages in question still belonged to him.

His own hand moving, bioluminescent and blue in the darkness.

The dead skin of the Lucian soldier’s hand.

An electronic chime sounded as the door opened, and he flinched.

“I got you some Vitamin Water,” Young said. “And a protein bar. One for girls. Next time, stick around to pick your own food.”

“I’m not hungry,” Rush said. He ground his cigarette out on top of a concrete bin and headed in the direction of the motel.

He could hear Ginn say, behind him, sounding puzzled, “You segregate your foodstuff by gender?”

Young said, "It was a joke."

Then the noise of gravel crunching under lightly jogging footsteps. Rush hadn’t thought Young could jog in his current condition. He was impressed.

A heap of wadded-up fabric, chemical-smelling, hit him in the head.

“Put your damn sweatshirt on,” Young said. “You’re cold.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re setting a bad example.”

“For whom?” Rush deigned to stop and stoop, picking the black sweatshirt up off the tarmac. He held it disdainfully between two fingers.

Young gestured. “For Lucian Alliance back there.”

Rush looked. Ginn was struggling into her vividly purple and quite oversized buffalo t-shirt as she walked, clutching several bananas, a long strip of beef jerky, and an open bag of trail mix.

“She doesn’t appear to need any assistance,” he said. “And she has a name.”

“Right,” Young said. He studied Rush. “You’ve still got blood on your mouth, by the way.”

Rush’s hand went there without his own volition. His lip felt bruised. He found the crust of the wound. “Yes, well,” he said. “God forbid I should suffer a split lip.”

Young looked away, squinting— as though the dark of the mountains were midday sunlight, or he were in pain. “The situation’s resolved,” he said. “At the Mountain. They’re still in lockdown, but they figure everything’s more-or-less under control at this point. We should be able to head back home sometime tomorrow. I picked up a burner; Mitchell’s going to call and give me the all-clear.”

“Ah,” Rush said. It seemed, somehow, strangely anticlimactic.

“We managed to get a U.S. senator shot, so _that’s_ a public relations nightmare.”

“The girl,” Rush said distantly, remembering. “Her father.”

Young frowned. “What?”

Rush shook his head. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

He was thinking of the careful way the senator’s daughter had clutched her pen.

“He died,” Young said. “We lost a lot of people. The Lucians got one of the scientists, too, someone with some of the genes they were looking for. Some kid in astrophysics, Dale Volker.”

Rush’s finger had returned to his lip. He pressed there, against the bruised part, until he tasted blood. He was familiar with the flavour. He didn’t say anything.

Young said, “Mitchell said he was glowing.”

Rush closed his eyes.

“David’s alive,” Young said.

Rush turned away. His intent was to start walking, and possibly to hurl the sweatshirt out towards the highway that cut a pale and mechanical scar through the low grass. But before he could do either, Ginn caught up to him and Young.

She had straightened her shirt out, and had her hand pressed possessively over the ghostly print of the buffalo. “Rush says that Americans kill this animal,” she said to Young. “Rush says that Americans have killed so many of this animal that now they do not live here any longer.”

Young rubbed at his forehead, looking persecuted. “We have kind of— a complicated national history.”

“I don’t understand. Were the buffalos your predator?”

“No,” Young said. “They—“

“Did you hunt them to extinction for their meat?”

“Not exactly.”

Ginn frowned. On her it was a hurt expression. “I don’t understand,” she said again. Then: “Have you killed many buffalos?”

“No, of course not!” Young raked his whole hand, agitated, down his face. “You have to get a special permit. Anyway, I haven’t hunted since I was a kid, and that was just deer and duck-shooting. What the hell did you tell her, Rush?”

Rush shrugged without much energy. “It’s the truth, isn’t it? Don’t you ever think about it?”

“What, _buffalo?_ ”

“Yes.” Rush hugged his arms to his chest, conscious of the thinness of his undershirt, how little protection it provided him against the desert wind, which carried not only the cold with it, but a smell of the higher desert further out, with its sparse carpet of scrubby, knotted, and recalcitrant plants. “When I was first offered the position in Colorado, my… I knew someone who was fascinated by the American West. She told me that so many buffalo once lived in the stretch of land from Canada to Colorado that the sound of them was mistaken for thunder, and even a century or more after their extinction began, a man might travel through one herd for six days or more without emerging from it. It seems impossible to imagine that something might be so central to what you know of a place— an animal upon which all else in an ecosystem rests— and then gone. Like _that_.” He snapped his fingers. “A hundred years, maybe; a few generations; _nothing_ , it’s nothing; it’s—“

“Yes,” Young said.

Rush looked at him, uncomprehending. “What?”

“You asked whether I ever think about it. I do.”

He had hunched his shoulders a little— not defensively, but as though he were embarrassed by what he had said.

Rush was caught off-guard. It was not the response he had expected. He felt as though he had been interrupted in the middle of a speech, that he had been building to some point in the most analogical sense: a high place of splendid isolation that he would cling to as intransigently as one of the desert plants. Now he would not get there, but the proposed diversion was one that intrigued him. “Do you?” he asked.

Young made an awkward, uncomfortable gesture. “There was a camp story that made the rounds when I was a kid, about the last buffalo. Not really the last one, of course, but pretty much all the ones we’ve got now are crossbreeds, at least a little bit. Or maybe we just didn’t have our facts straight. It doesn’t matter. We were sure it was the last one, and that it’d been alive since the Indians, and that it roamed the plains, wreaking vengeance on dumbass Wyoming ranch kids who snuck out of their cabins after curfew.”

Rush huffed something that was close to a laugh.

Young was smiling, too, but his smile faded. “So we must have known,” he said. “I mean, that something was wrong, that our grandparents, our great-grandparents had… that _somewhere,_ somehow, something’d gone wrong. But it doesn’t work like that, I guess. You can know and not-know.”

“Yes,” Rush said.

They stood in silence for a moment. It was— almost— a companionable silence.

Finally Young turned away, a stupid grin creeping over his face, and said, “You know, the last buffalo’s still out there somewhere—“

“Fuck off,” Rush said immediately.

“—wandering all over the great bison belt—“

Ginn was frowning at Young, looking worried. “I don’t know what is a camp story. This is a true thing? There is such a creature?”

“No,” Rush said.

Young said, “Sure it is. With his red eyes, and his horns that glow in the dark, and his hooves sharpened like knife blades—“

“He’s punch-drunk,” Rush told Ginn.

“I’m just saying,” Young said. “If I were you, I’d put your sweatshirt on, in case we have to start running.”

Rush looked at him. The skin under Young’s eyes was so bruise-coloured that he might have been beaten; his mouth was tight, with marked lines at each edge. Despite the chill in the air, he was sweating through his shirt. He needed opioids, probably, and a doctor, or at the very least some aspirin and a good night’s rest. Yet here he was, three hundred miles from his home, attempting adolescent humor in the car park of a Days Inn, with an audience that was optimistically a little less than half human. It spoke to a failure of logic that one ought to, objectively, find appalling; how could a man be trusted when his actions were so wild and absurd, so wholly lacking in substantive reasoning, to the point that they would achieve pseudorandomness if it weren’t for the devastating flaw that was their at-the-same-time utter predictability, their grounding in a cartoonish set of emotional commitments that no one on Earth used as a foundation for problem-solving. Did they? _Did_ they?

More out of a desire to see what would happen than out of a willingness to concede to Young’s unserious point or, indeed, to any aspect of the onslaught of aspects that was Young, Rush pulled the abominable sweatshirt over his head. It had a hood, naturally. It was far too large, and the cuffs of the sleeves fell over his hands. He directed a long-suffering look at Young.

“I thought we were already running,” he said.

* * *

Ginn slept hard, though she had slept in the car already; halfway through whatever garish and grating late-late-night television programme Young had selected, she had gone lax, curled in a semi-defensive posture on the far bed. She was clad in her pink track pants, buffalo shirt, and, incongruously, her solid Lucian boots, presumably on guard against an early-morning call to keep running. On the flickering TV, a low-level comedian was telling jokes that were incomprehensible to Rush, who did not deign to follow politics or, indeed, the news. Perhaps they were funny jokes, though this was a possibility whose likelihood Rush rated rather low. Young was not laughing— but then Young did not have a sense of humour, or at least not a very sophisticated one.

Young himself seemed close to sleep. His eyes kept slipping closed, the aquarium-like light of the television writing inscrutable shapes on top of them. This ought to have muffled his blunt, masculine presence, but did not.

Rush had been imprisoned with Young for a week— perhaps not even a week, he considered, but then the calculation of time was not his speciality— but he had not ever seen Young in bed. He resented having to do so now, which was why he had removed himself to the artificially pleasant armchair by the window, where he was contemplating his notebook with his knees pulled up to his chest.

He found it objectionable. Young’s presence. How weary he looked. The undershirt he wore. The white piece of gauze that, earlier, he had held secured to his bicep whilst Rush had used bits of tape to secure it to his skin, before Young had made good on the reciprocal manoeuvre. He had not wanted Young’s hands so close to his body.

He stared unseeing at the pencil-marks that constituted notes towards a potential new attack on the ninth chevron cyphertext.

“You coming to bed?”

Startled, he looked over to see Young watching him— eyes heavy, as though their fringe of lashes was weighing them down.

“No,” he said.

“Seriously?”

“Not tired.”

Young breathed out a frustrated sound. “You are such a fucking liar.”

Rush shrugged somewhat limply.

“If you want the bed— if the thing with me and David makes you uncomfortable—“

“No,” Rush said blankly. “No, that’s not it; I’m the last person who would— no. No.”

“So why can’t you just—“

“I’m _not tired._ ”

“Rush,” Young said.

Rush looked down at his notepad. The room felt very small and very private, despite the low sound of the television— as though the world outside were immobilised by snow, and in this room alone, anchored by Young’s presence, could objects move, breathe, hum with the faint electromagnetic currents that suspended life like a frail spiderweb inside of them.

“When I close my eyes,” he said, “I keep seeing—“

Young waited for the conclusion of the sentence.

But Rush had shut his mouth, resolute. He set pencil to paper and drew an unnecessarily savage factorial exclamation mark.

“What?” Young said.

Rush shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Rush—“

“Fuck off,” Rush said, with less force than he had intended.

There was a brief silence.

Young picked up the remote and turned off the television. “Yeah, okay,” he said. He sounded defeated. “You’re not going to do something stupid if I fall asleep, are you? Freak out in the middle of the night and decide to head for the hills?”

Rush played with his pencil. “What, are you _worried_ about me?”

“Hell, no,” Young said easily. “I’m worried about the poor folk who’re gonna spot you, glowing in the dark and running along out on the Colorado Plateau. That’d be a hell of a story to hush up. Worse than aliens at Roswell.”

Rush’s mouth twitched in spite of himself. “You realise, of course, that I do not actually glow in the dark.”

“Sure you do.” Young shifted, turning onto his side and resting his head against his right arm. “I’ve seen it.”

“That was a specific chemical reaction triggered by whatever substance was in the gas.”

“Still,” Young said, sounding drowsy, almost what an American might have termed _dopey._ “Maybe you better stick around. We don’t need too many glow-in-the-dark things wandering around out there.”

“I do _not_ glow in the dark,” Rush said.

“Or if you do run off, make sure to keep that sweatshirt with you.”

Rush was still wearing the sweatshirt. He looked down at its offensive print. “Has it got some sort of light-absorbent properties of which I’m not aware?”

“No; I’d just hate to see you get cold.”

“Go to sleep,” Rush told him repressively. “You’re delirious; you’ve probably injured yourself internally. _And_ I’m certain you’ve got food poisoning as well.”

Young hmmed, amused. But his eyes were closed, and after a moment his breathing evened. He didn’t speak again.

Rush watched him.

After a while, he abruptly, almost angrily, unfolded himself from the chair and went to the window. It was dark; the glass was cold. He could see the ordinary lights of the industrial American landscape, bleak and lacking in any beautiful intent. The highway, the interchange, the gas station, further gas stations, the single specks of ranches or oil derricks, far out. And then the immensity of the blackness, a space in which it was possible to believe that anything might live.

He imagined doing as Young had worried he would do, and walking out into that blackness. Perhaps, he thought, he _would_ glow— but he did not like the idea. There had been an interval of time in the Mountain in which he had been inexplicably afraid that the glowing hand he saw was not his, that though it still formed part of his body, it could no longer be counted amongst the assemblage of parts according to which he was constituted. This raised a number of troubling questions: on what grounds could he argue for any sort of personal coherence, if not that it was biologically determined? If his hand could cease to be his hand, could he find that he had annexed other objects without warning? Or would he only go on losing, until there was nothing left? What parts of the world could he claim belonged to him? How could he prove that he had the right to any part of the world whatsoever?

A gust of wind sheared against the building.

He closed his eyes and leant his forehead against the glass, overwhelmed by a sudden wave of nausea and the conviction that if he entered into that blackness, there would _be_ no him. He would have crossed some asymptote that kept properties from collapsing; he would be a function that had flirted too wantonly with such a collapse, until it was not a function any longer, and the asymptote was not an asymptote; until they bled into an unboundaried sea of blackness. He would be everything and therefore he would also be nothing.

He was going to be sick.

He was not thinking rationally.

He had no asymptote.

He was not a function.

He was possessed of all the parts of his body. They were contained in a pair of battered jeans and an oversized truck-stop sweatshirt. He was wearing slightly crooked glasses. His hands were clenched into fists. There was scruffy and no-doubt-unhygienic motel carpet under his bare feet.

Still.

“Still,” he whispered.

He turned and crossed the room, feeling slightly frightened.

Young had left a broad stretch of space in the bed. Rush sat at the far edge. The sound of Young’s breathing— not quite a snore, but working up to it— was reassuring, if for no other reason than that Rush found it impossible to imagine Young, who was so insufferably plebeian that he snored and watched bad television and ate Subway, having any doubts whatsoever about the composition of his body. That was Young’s snore-in-progress; those were his lungs, his uvula and palate; turning to look, one could easily see the lumbering body and bulldog face that were singularly and unquestionably Young’s, the lumpen shoulders, the freckles on the bared arm, the springing corona of curls.

And if Young was Young, then perhaps Rush could be certain that he was Rush.

Eventually, hating himself for it, he lay down on the bare half of the bed and studied the ceiling, conscious of Young’s blunt, masculine, snoring, freckled, warm, plebeian body, next to yet kept carefully separate from him. The ceiling was speckled with the uneven texture of plaster, which resembled stars. He did not want to impose constellations on that structure, because he disapproved of pareidolia as a rule. But he found himself finding them anyway: Greek letters and the faces outside the Sheldonian; Stargate glyphs, swimming fish, and swans’ necks; then, inevitably, a lifeless, splayed-out human hand. The hand turned, as he watched, into a starfish, then a coral, then a siphonophore’s tendrils, and then lost cohesion altogether and became flecks of plaster again, as numerous as stars or as buffalo upon the ancient prairie, and it was at that point that he began to grow drowsy— thinking vaguely that he heard the drumming of hooves, before realizing it was only the more ordinary sound of Young breathing.

“Typical,” he murmured, frowning, and buried his face in the pillow. “Louder than a bloody stampede.”

He slept.


	17. Chapter 17

With the weight of the entire military establishment behind him, Young had managed to order up a car rental by the time noon rolled arround, when Rush pried himself out of bed, realized that the coffee at the motel only came with those little single-serve creamers, refused to drink it, and declared that they would have to have breakfast in Vail.

“We’re not going to Vail,” Young said.

He’d woken up feeling intensely hungover, and almost incapable of standing. The muscles in his hips and lower back had stiffened to the point that he was pretty much a literal tin soldier, and he was sure that one of the screws in his spine was grinding against the bone. Any inexplicable fondness that might have briefly frissoned through him when he woke up to find Rush forming a disgruntled little heap of snarled hair and oversized sweatshirt beside him, managing to look contrary even in his sleep, had faded by the time he’d gotten a handful of Advil and several cups of motel coffee inside him, and had spent a good hour on the phone, first with Mitchell, then intermittently with the rent-a-car place and General O’Neill.

At some point the Lucian girl had woken up, too, and stood around in the motel lobby in her boots and pink sweatpants, saying shit like, “What is paper?” and “From what animal do these eggs come?” Maybe Rush found that kind of thing charming, but Young didn’t. Mostly he was on his last nerve, and a little worried that the motel clerk was going to think he was some kind of sex trafficker.

And then Rush had graced them with his presence, and it quickly become apparent that for classified reasons of his own he’d decided to up both the quantity and quality of his standard asshole behavior by about twelve hundred percent, a change that made itself known first through his refusal to abide by the motel’s no-smoking policy, which got them asked to leave the lobby within ten minutes of his arrival, and second through his sudden commitment to single-origin coffee— although that was really only the last of his demands, which included, in no particular order, sunglasses, a laptop, a new phone, a wristwatch, and a lawyer through whom he could sue the SGC for a list of unspecified grievances.

Vail was the only immediately actionable item on his list, which was why it was where Young had put his foot down.

But when a confused-looking rental clerk arrived in the lime-green hatchback that O’Neill had arranged to have dropped off for them, Rush had gotten his hands on Young’s burner phone and was scanning through cafe listings. “Oh, you’ll like this one,” he said, without looking up. “It’s got an idiotic name. ‘Yeti’s Grind.’ That’s Americans for you; it’s not even clever.”

Young said, “Put the goddamn phone down and get in the car.”

“Nor is it an American monster, the yeti, so points off for that as well.”

“Rush.”

“I suppose they couldn’t have known that they had a ready-made monster waiting under one of their very own mountains.”

Young snatched the phone from Rush’s hand and stalked around to the driver’s side of the car.

“I was talking about Stargate Command,” Rush said spitefully, over the car roof.

“Yeah,” Young said. “Thanks. I got that.”

“The monster? Under the mountain?”

Young got in the car and stuck the key in the ignition, biting down on his lip for a second to control how much it hurt to sit. “If you’re not in the backseat in the next five seconds, I’m leaving you here.”

The Lucian girl was already sitting in the passenger seat of the car, reading a _USA Today_ with an expression of deep fascination, but she looked up in concern at that. “But this is not a scientific installation,” she said. “Surely you are being facetious.”

“Four seconds,” Young said. “Three. Two.”

Rush climbed into the backseat, slamming the door behind him so hard that the entire car shook. His mouth was tight. “You’ve already tried that line,” he said. “It isn’t effective, remember? It only works when you’re threatening a person, and not an interstellar resource.”

“Well, maybe you could try acting like a person,” Young said shortly. “It’d be a nice change for all of us.”

“Fuck you,” Rush bit out. “I want a cup of coffee.”

Young pulled out of the motel parking lot and headed onto I-70. “Then you should’ve gotten one back at the motel.”

“Isn’t it your _job_ to ensure that I’m able to function?”

“No, actually,” Young said. “It isn’t.”

Rush ignored this interjection. “I must say that the very fact that Stargate Command would entrust such a role to you suggests a grave lapse in their decision-making skills; I say _lapse in skills_ , but I suppose I mean _lack of skills whatsoever._ They could have at least sent a competent sergeant to chauffeur me back to base—“

“The competent sergeants all have better things to do,” Young said. “Assuming they’re not Lucian spies to start with.”

“—but instead I’m stuck with someone who’s quite probably going to steer us into traffic because he lacks the use of both his legs.”

The Advil that Young had taken wasn’t helping. He fixated on the license plate of the car in front of him, a battered rust-red Toyota sedan. 503-L18, it read. Young found himself trying to make sense of it, even though there wasn’t any sense to be made. He wondered if he’d stress-fractured a vertebra. Probably he would feel that. Then again, maybe he was so used to hurting that he wouldn’t even register the change.

For some reason Rush was still talking. “I can’t imagine what I’m meant to conclude from this if not that I don’t rate so highly as a resource as I’d been led to believe; has that dead senator’s daughter found another cryptographer overnight?”

Young wished the doctors could’ve just taken the bones out in the first place and put something else in instead. He wasn’t attached to all the bits and pieces. He’d just as soon be metal, something that didn’t hurt so much. Better that than this long slow crumbling obsolescence.

“But then, it was never about the cryptography, was it?” Rush asked, or, really, demanded. “It was always about the genes. Perhaps they’ve bred another me, in a lab, without the parts they object to. That would be a very neat solution all around, wouldn’t it?”

Better than turning into someone who wasn’t him.

“How regrettable it is that the technology to do so doesn’t exist yet,” Rush said. “How satisfying it would be for you not to need me, by which I mean not to have to keep up this make believe that you care whether or not I live.”

“Can you just shut the hell up?” Young said. He was digging the fingers of one hand into his hip. He hadn’t meant to do it. The pain of each fingertip formed a point of clarity, like a pearl he was having to pry open razor-edged oysters to get. “Please?”

“Perhaps you _would_ have left me at the motel, in that case. I suppose you would have done. Would you?” Rush’s voice had taken on a hard, nervous, agitated edge. “Would you?”

“I sure as hell wish I could’ve,” Young snapped.

He saw, in the rearview mirror, Rush settle back against the seat with a savage air of smugness, looking as though he’d won the argument. “Of course you do,” Rush said. “But you can’t. So I want a cup of coffee.”

“You know what, fuck you,” Young said. He accelerated to pass the rust-red Toyota. The feverish light of midday was cutting his skin open, exposing all his insides. _I bought you a sweatshirt_ , he wanted to say. He didn’t know why it was relevant. If he could’ve kicked Rush out of the car he would’ve, and he pictured it for a second: Rush skidding on his hands and knees, spitting up dirt on the highway shoulder, having to for one time in his goddamn life get himself out of trouble, instead of having someone else do it for him. “You’d last five goddamn minutes with the Lucian Alliance, you know that? I should’ve let them have you.”

He was aware, in his peripheral vision, of the Lucian girl's hands collapsing the edges of her newspaper, crumpling it into dense little balls in her fists.

Rush looked bored. He glanced out the window, crossing his arms over his chest. “Don’t forget the sunglasses,” he said.

* * *

They made it to Colorado Springs in a little under seven hours, stopping once so that the girl— who still wasn’t used to cars— could throw up, and then again so that Young— who didn’t have an excuse, except that the pain had started making him nauseous right around the time they hit Denver— could do the same.

Rush drove the rest of the way after that. They didn’t have a conversation about it; Young emerged from the Conoco bathroom wiping his face with his hand to find Rush leaning against the driver’s side door. Rush held his hand out without looking at Young, and Young, after a long hesitation, dropped the car keys into it.

When they got close to the Mountain, the girl asked, with trepidation, “What will happen to me?”

It hadn’t escaped Young’s notice that she hadn’t asked, or that she could’ve run off. She’d had every chance; she could’ve taken their wallets at gunpoint, or while they were sleeping. Hell, she could’ve asked Rush nicely to drop her off somewhere on the way down from Denver, and for all Young knew he would’ve. But she hadn’t, even when Young had made it clear where they were going.

“Well,” Young said, “we’ve got a protocol for enemy aliens who want to earn American citizenship. You’ll have to stay on base for a while— it’s not exactly a prison; they’ve got rooms with beds and TVs and books. They’ll want to ask you a lot of questions, which I suggest you answer.”

“They will torture me,” Ginn said. It wasn’t a question, and she didn’t seem particularly upset about it.

“ _No_ ,” Rush said immediately. Then he glanced at Young with a suspicion that made Young’s stomach turn.

“ _No_ ,” Young said. “God, no. We don’t do that kind of thing.”

Rush was still looking at him like he didn’t believe it.

“The idea is that you give us information because we’re giving you other things. Food. Clothes. Eventually, if they decide you’re not a security risk, an American passport.”

The girl frowned. “What if I don’t want to be an American?”

“America’s being pretty fucking nice to you, if you ask me,” Young said, a little more shortly than he would’ve liked to. “So if I were you, I’d take what you’re offered.”

She didn’t ask him any more questions after that.

* * *

Lam wanted Young in the infirmary right away, but O’Neill wanted to debrief him, and Young was experiencing a pretty intense dread of the inevitable medical examination, so he threw his weight in with O’Neill.

“I’m fine,” he told Lam. “I’ll be up in like a half hour.”

She looked skeptical, but she herded Rush off with her. A couple of sergeants had already come for the Lucian girl.

“So,” O’Neill said, wandering around Landry’s office— which was where all three of them had initially been dumped, presumably on the grounds that it was supposed to be one of the safest places on the base.

“So,” Young said. ‘Sir.”

“General Landry sends his regards. Something about how we got a U.S. senator killed, and now the IOA’s in meltdown, and he’s having to work hard to keep the press off our backs.”

“Right,” Young said. “I heard.”

“You heard, did you? On your little field trip?” O’Neill leveled a narrow look at him.

“Mitchell told me.“ Young shifted uncomfortable in his chair. “It seemed like the best option at the time,” he offered. “The whole— stealing a car thing.”

“Oh, it definitely was. I’m kind of impressed you could pull it off.”

“It turns out Rush can hotwire just about anything.”

“Great. _That_ sounds like a fun, safe hobby.” O’Neill leaned against the desk, his arms crossed. “But you managed to bring him back. Alive. With a Lucian defector.”

“Well, I came close to killing him myself a few times, but, you know, I’d already gone to so much trouble.”

O’Neill didn’t crack a smile. He was staring up at the ceiling. “The decision’s been made to send him offworld.”

Young stared at him. “ _What?_ ”

“For the thing, the thing with the DHD. We can’t risk waiting, after this. We need those codes broken. And now that the Alliance has their own candidate—“

“Candidate for _what?_ ” Young asked. “Sir.”

O’Neill looked at him, raising an eyebrow. “You decided if you’re in on the Icarus Project? Cause that was the deal. You’re either all-in, or you’re all-out.”

“That’s Colonel Telford’s project,” Young said. He felt a sick surge of alarm. “Mitchell said that he was—“

“Oh, he’s fine.” O’Neill waved a hand. “Banged up, the usual. That man could survive a nuclear explosion.”

“I can’t—” Young said, before he could stop himself. “I mean, can I see him?”

O’Neill slanted a very specific kind of look at him. “He’s in lockdown for the next thirty days, while we try to figure out if he got shot up with that damn Lucian brainwashing drug. Carolyn’s working on a test. Till then, he needs a second-in-command to take over.”

“Oh,” Young said. He felt taken aback. He hadn’t given the job offer much consideration, what with the shooting and the smoke and the Lucian girl and driving halfway across the state. Maybe he hadn’t really thought it could be serious in the first place. “I’m sorry, I haven’t really had time to, uh—“

O’Neill let him flounder for a minute, and then seemed to lose patience with his continued inability to come up with something to say. “Mitchell told me Rush read his medical records,” he said, which seemed like a non sequitur. “He’s pretty sure Jackson dropped a dime to Rush about them, which in pretty classic Jackson form has pissed off a lot of people. Is that what the kids are saying now? Dropped a dime?”

“I really wouldn’t know,” Young said.

“You think it was the right call?”

“For Jackson to—“ Young made a vague sort of gesture.

O’Neill regarded him intently.

As usual, Young felt about three steps behind O’Neill. He could tell the question was important, but he didn’t know what the right answer— if there was a right answer; sometimes there wasn’t, to that kind of question— might be. “Right for who?” he asked carefully. “Right for _Rush?_ I think he’s got a right to know, but it wasn’t the right way to tell him; all it did was make him pissed off and scared.”

“And that bothers you,” O’Neill said. His expression was unreadable.

“I mean— if nothing else, I don’t think it’s a great plan.”

Young was reluctant to say what he felt; it _did_ bother him, now that he thought about it, even though an hour before he’d have happily pushed Rush through a plate-glass window. There’d been something about the dead tone in Rush’s voice when he’d said, _So you did know_ ; the brittleness in the words he’d thrown at Ginn: _the many diverse parties who have proven so averse to sharing what they know about my body._ It _was_ his body. Young hadn’t really thought about it like that before. He was used to the idea that bodies could belong to other people; he’d signed his over to the Air Force, and had found it a light yoke for the most part. The Air Force had done a damn sight better at taking care of his body than he himself ever had. But Rush— the idea of Rush being made subject to somebody else's desires, their orders, made him suddenly protective for reasons he wasn’t able to name.

“What’s this about?” he asked, wanting to change the focus of the conversation before he said something he shouldn’t. “Is Jackson the one who wanted me to take on Icarus?”

O’Neill shook his head. “No. That was my idea. He came around to it eventually.”

“And now?” Do you still want me now, he meant. Is it still the best idea you could come up with, now that you've got a look at me. Now that it's all gone to shit.

O’Neill looked down and brushed an invisible piece of lint from his uniform trousers. He seemed thoughtful. Again, Young was aware that there were parts of the conversation he wasn’t getting, undercurrents going astray in the air. “Now,” O’Neill said, “I think you should get checked out by medical, and after that I think you should spend a week or so training Rush to go offworld. Then, assuming you’re interested, I’d like to read you into the Icarus Project.”

“—Oh,” Young said. It wasn’t really the answer he’d expected.

“Any questions?”

“No,” Young said. “I mean—“ _Why me?_ he wanted to ask. _You could’ve had anyone. Not just—_ He could understand why Jackson wouldn’t want him; even without Young’s history of monumentally fucking up. Jackson was all elevated thoughts and moral logic, cosmic entities and quantum physics. In spite of what he’d said when he’d helped Young move, Young was convinced that on Jackson’s radar he barely registered as a shadow, a sort of staticky fritz indicating that something partially sentient _might_ be there. And David damn sure wouldn’t want Young anywhere near his project, especially with Young in the shape he was in; David didn’t have a lot of patience for weakness, usually, which was why when he’d hauled Young up that caldera, it had seemed for a second like maybe—

“No,” Young said again. “Thank you, sir.”

He rose with a flinch he couldn’t conceal, and saluted.

O’Neill returned the salute. “You did good,” he said, as Young turned to go. “You gotta learn to quit, though, you know, one of these days, or you’re gonna end up in pieces.”

Young paused. “Yes, sir,” he said.

* * *

Rush was still in the infirmary, which Young hadn’t wanted or expected— stretched out on a bed with his arms folded, looking murderous.

“So you did turn out to have a concussion,” Young said. “Or is the brain damage permanent? That would explain a lot.”

“Fuck you,” Rush said. “They took the car away.”

“Yeah, of course they did. It’s a rental. It’s not your personal limousine.”

In response, Rush stretched out a hand and said, “Keys.”

“What?” Young was looking around for Lam.

Rush snapped his fingers. “Give me your keys.”

“You mean, like, _my_ keys? To _my car?_ ”

Rush jerked his head imperiously and snapped his fingers again.

“Right, that’s not happening,” Young said.

“Don’t be absurd. _I_ am cleared to leave this den of fascism and—“ Rush paused. He appeared to be searching for an insulting enough noun. There was something a little bit blurry about his face; maybe for once in his life he was actually tired. “This den of fascism and—“

Dr. Lam appeared, flipping through a chart.

“Hey,” Young said to her.

“—Whereas _you_ ,” Rush continued, “are _not_ , and furthermore can no doubt rely on the intensely physical and emotionally remote comradeship of men to procure a ride home for yourself, probably in a vehicle of equally distasteful size.”

Young and Lam looked at him.

“Does he seriously not have a concussion?” Young said.

“No,” Lam said. “ _You_ , on the other hand…”

Young said ruefully, “Pretty sure that’s about the only thing I don’t have.”

He let her guide him over to one of the beds, and then hesitated when she indicated he should take off his coat.

“Do we have to—?” he said, jerking his head over at Rush. It didn’t make sense, really; he’d been in his t-shirt and boxers around Rush lots of times. Hell, the night before. But not like this— not with someone charting the damage done to his body, turning it into less of a body than a machine he’d managed to wreck. He didn’t want Rush to see him like that. He thought— and it was a strange thought, one that hadn’t occurred to him before— that for all Rush’s nasty little jabs about cripples, he was the only one who didn’t really treat Young like that. To Rush, it was like being in the Air Force, or listening to country music— a personal flaw that couldn’t be helped, one that was no more or less irritating than everything else Young did. Everything else Young _was_.

“I can pull a curtain,” Lam said, looking uncertain.

“Yeah, please,” Young said.

“I resent being detained here,” Rush said loudly, as Lam pulled the curtain.

Young peeled himself out of his coat off with a wince. He still had the brace on underneath, which he guessed was _something_.

“What’s your pain level like?” Lam asked.

“Oh, you know.” He waved a hand.

She was watching him with eyes that were very warm, but careful. “I don’t, actually. I’ve never broken my back.”

Young squinted at the outline of a lamp, visible through the curtain. “I think one of the screws might be doing that thing.”

“That thing? Which thing? You mean bone irritation?”

“Yeah. That.”

“Okay. Well, we can do an X-ray. If you suffered a serious impact, it’s possible something got knocked out of place.”

Young shrugged.

Lam attempted a smile. “That’s it? Shrug?”

“I mean,” Young said. “—Sure.”

He didn’t know how to explain that he didn’t really think it made a difference whether she did an X-ray or not. The part that mattered was over. It’d been over for months now. It was just— over. So it was hard for him to care what she did.

He was starting to have this sinking feeling that he didn’t like. It hadn’t been there when he was fighting, even though that had hurt a lot, or when he was headed out west on I-70, when the pain had really set in and he had watched the tops of the mountains start to blur through the windows as the white sparks of almost-blacking-out blended with the eggshell blue of dusk. When they’d stopped for the night, he’d felt almost euphoric. Like he could keep going forever. He hadn’t wanted to come back, he thought. He should never have given himself that taste of what it had once been like, what it wasn’t going to be like from now on, because he’d always known that in the end he was going to have to come back and face—

“If you could take your shirt and brace off,” Lam said, “I’m going to do a brief exam, just to get a sense of what kind of function you have right now.”

“Right,” Young said.

Mechanically, he complied. He was familiar with the motions. He’d done this a hundred times or more, stripping down in front of doctors who wanted to touch his spine with cool fingers, probing impersonally for signs he didn’t know about and couldn’t recognize. They read his body like it was a book written in a coded language, one that had never been taught to him.

Lam was gentle; she was nice about it; he did like her.

He stared at the circle of the lamp.

“No numbness or tingling?” she asked.

“No.”

But he felt like he was numb all over his body. It just wasn’t the kind of numbness she was asking about.

“Okay, if you could just lower your pants for a sec—“

He did, and felt her fingertips against his hipbones, pressing briefly. It hurt, of course; of course it did.

It occurred to him that she’d been the last person to touch him like this, and before that it had been another doctor. Or maybe the PT girl. He hadn’t slept with anyone since before he got VSIded. So it’d just been all these anonymous hands.

“The— Lucian girl tackled me,” he said. His voice sounded like it was coming from far away. “Took me down pretty good.”

“Is that right?”

“Uh-huh. I figure that probably did me worse than the running.”

Lam’s fingers were moving along the scar that wrapped his right hip. “The way I hear it, you were running, jumping— playing action hero.”

“That’s— overstating it a little,” Young said. He flinched as she hit some IED of pain he hadn’t known was embedded.

“You can pull your pants up again,” Lam said.

He did.

“I noticed you didn’t give me a pain number,” she said, moving around to face him. She had the same expression she’d had before, the professional friendliness that hinted at a suppressed depth of sympathy she knew that you weren’t ready for her to feel. “I’m guessing it’s high.”

Young half-shrugged. He looked away for a second. “It gets hard to put a number on it,” he said. “After a while.”

“Yeah.”

“I threw up on the way here.”

“Well, that’s not a good sign.” Lam removed a small wisp of hair from her face with a casual movement. “My knee-jerk opinion is that this is all just muscle pain, from _drastic_ overuse, and it’ll resolve itself. We’ll do the X-ray to be sure.”

Young nodded.

“You realize that major hardware problems mean you might be looking at another surgery.”

“Yeah,” Young said. “I know.”

She flashed him a quick, reassuring smile. “I don’t think we’re anywhere near that point, but it’s something to consider, the next time you decide to let yourself get tackled.”

“I don’t think you understand the principle of tackling,” Young said. His tone was wry, and he thought that was good, that he could be so laid-back and funny and, frankly, charming when he kind of felt like he was going to throw up again.

“Just— consider it,” Lam said. She rested her hand on his bare shoulder for a moment, light and trying-to-be-comforting. “I’ll let Imaging know you’re coming in; let me go write you a scrip for a stronger muscle relaxant. I know you’ve got a cabinet full of shit at home, pardon my language, so I need you to be really good about not mixing-and-matching, okay?”

“Yeah,” Young said again. “Sure.”

She smiled again and ducked out behind the curtain. Young was left sitting there on the bed, and though he pulled his undershirt on, tugged his shirt on, and started, without much energy, to do up the buttons, he still felt mostly naked. He thought about lying on the X-ray table, listening for the tech’s voice on the intercom, feeling stupid and human and exposed in the face of the humming, vast, and sophisticated machine, and again he was struck by that sinking feeling. Like he’d swallowed a weight and was staring upwards through water, knowing there was no way he’d manage to summon enough force to kick his way up.

Something rustled out in the infirmary. He supposed it was Rush. He was amazed Rush had kept his mouth shut for this long. Probably he’d just been thinking up some really good new insults for Young.

There was no point in the curtain anymore, though, so Young pulled it back. Rush was still sitting on the other bed with his arms crossed tightly across his chest. He looked away quickly, as though he was trying to hide the fact that he’d been staring. He’d been eavesdropping, too, Young was sure.

“Sorry to fuck up your big plans for the night,” Young said. “With my X-ray.”

Rush shrugged minutely, without looking at him.

“I mean, God knows you’ve got so much to get back to.” Young had stood, facing away from Rush, and was folding his coat to drape over his arm.

Rush drew a breath to respond.

“No,” Young said. “Don’t even start.”

Rush let the breath out slowly.

He was wearing the sweatshirt from the truck stop, Young noticed. He hadn’t been before; he’d put it on. That was what the rustling had been.

* * *

They didn’t talk on the way home, after Lam had taken a look at Young’s X-rays and declared that he could get away with a week of bed rest, because at the very least he wasn’t doing any more damage to himself. That was something Young hadn’t wrapped his brain around yet— the idea that he could be damaging himself just by sitting, standing, walking around, all the everyday motions of being human. His body was its own enemy, which meant he was always under assault. It was exhausting. There was no place where he could ever be safe.

It was night, and the streets were empty. A storm must have swept through while they were in the base, because the asphalt was patterned with torn leaves, black and slick.

As the car entered the apartment complex, Rush said, subdued, “My laptop’s in your flat. I’ll have that back.”

Young didn’t say anything. He parked the truck. Then he said, “Yeah, okay.”

Upstairs, he watched Rush collect his computer and a few stray items of clothing. For some reason it struck him as odd, the idea of not having Rush in his apartment. He’d just sort of assumed that Rush would be there, like Rush had been there since Young’d moved in, taking up space at the kitchen, scribbling on classified documents, and complaining about whatever was on TV. The thought of being alone with all the furniture he hadn’t really picked out was depressing. But he was going to have to do it sooner or later; it was like the X-ray.

So he said tiredly, while Rush was opening the door, “Did you throw my liquor out, too? Along with my beer and hot dogs? Or did it manage to meet your cosmopolitan standards?”

Rush paused, but didn’t look at him. “I left it where I found it,” he said coolly. “It seemed like a heavily-trafficked area.”

“Great,” Young said. He didn’t care enough for a comeback.

“By that I mean—“

“Fuck you. Goodnight.” Then he remembered. “O’Neill expects me to prep you to go offworld, so I’ll come by tomorrow.”

Rush stilled in the act of stepping out into the hallway. “They’re sending me to a planet with a DHD?”

“Guess so.”

“No. Don’t come by.”

Young sighed. “I thought you _wanted_ to—“

“ _I’ll_ come _here_. I don’t want you in my apartment.”

Young let his forehead drop against the doorframe. “You know what? Sure. Whatever. Fine.”

“I expect you not to be hungover.”

Young bridled at the imperious note in his voice. “Then don’t come by before noon,” he snapped.

Rush frowned. “That seems excessive.”

Young shut the door in his face as a reply.

At least Rush had been telling the truth; there was Scotch and tequila under the kitchen island. Young pulled out the Scotch and poured himself a solid double in a previously-unused glass. He drank it slowly but methodically, trying to think resolutely of nothing.

Instead he kept thinking about that moment outside Grand Junction, crossing the scrubby little field in the dark, when he’d said to Rush: _You know, the last buffalo’s still out there somewhere…_ He’d been joking, and it had felt good, to joke without any real weight behind it, but there under the blurred band of stars, with the smell of blackbrush and Jeffrey pine coming through under that highway stink of tar and service stations— he had felt also that previously unhappenable things might happen, that if he squinted hard it would be possible to see the outline of animals he hadn’t ever known existed, moving in fields kept separate from him by a fence he had mistaken for the edge of the world. After all, there was Rush, who had glowed like something fragile and full of tendrils, pulled up from its native waters, something you ought to be able to see the inside of, straight through to its heart. And, sure, Rush was a jackass who’d huffed and pulled up the hood of his truck-stop sweatshirt and sulked off to go plan a petty tantrum, but for a second there, Young had seen a different kind of animal that he could be. It made him wonder if the same kind of thing was true of… It made him wonder, when he hadn’t wanted to wonder. When he knew that he had to, more than anything, just stop wondering, give up and resign himself to living inside his own skin.

His own skin, sutured together by scars he couldn’t look at, most nights. Hiding a body that couldn’t stand itself. That he couldn’t stand. That sometimes couldn’t _stand._

He poured himself another double and stared down at the whiskey, bracing his hands against the counter.

“Here’s to all the things that are off the table,” he said softly, tasting the sourness of the words, and drank.


	18. Chapter 18

The cell to which Ginn had been assigned, Rush discovered, was a small room that contained a cot, a desk, a bookshelf, and an old cathode-ray television with a built-in slot for VHS tapes. Rush had assumed that VHS tapes no longer existed, but perhaps Stargate Command had bought them all up; certainly, a disproportionate number of those still in existence appeared to be located in this room. He spotted _Titanic, Jurassic Park,_ several copies of something called _Hoosiers_ , a complete boxed set of _Hogan’s Heroes_ , and— to his personal disgust and deep offense— _Braveheart._ The selection of sad sagging paperbacks that made no pretense of filling the bookshelf was equally demoralizing; from the look of them (John Grisham, Michael Crichton, _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_ , a Gideon Bible, and _Gone With the Wind_ ), they appeared to have been supplied from a local Goodwill shop.

Ginn, of course, lacked the appropriate context to desire better, or else was proving to be possessed of appalling taste.

“It’s like life under the System Lords!” she enthused, holding up the battered cardboard case of _Braveheart._ “Before the Lucian Alliance overthrew them! These are your people? Why do they prevent their women from fighting? Their technology seems very primitive; is this why you ally yourself with the Americans?”

“It’s fiction,” Rush said repressively, glaring at the case from where he was leant against the doorframe, arms crossed. “About something that happened a thousand years ago. This is unacceptable; I’ll have some proper books and films brought for you. You ought at least to have a working knowledge of the classical canon. We can’t have you turning out like Young. How on earth have you been occupying yourself for the past two days?”

It had been more than two days, in fact; no one would let her see her on the first day, and by the second some sort of absurd and fascistic rule had been instituted that he was not to leave his apartment complex without military accompaniment, which—since Young injured was all-but-useless and seemed to have become, as a result, self-pitying to boot, a sad troll of a man who stank of booze more often than not— had meant that Rush had been required to put forth an truly enormous amount of effort to make himself unbearable enough that Young would request an on-call escort for him. The entirety of the second day had been occupied with achieving this goal.

Ginn did not appear to have minded. “I watched _Jurassic Park_ ,” she said, looking delighted. “Three times.”

Rush was beginning to develop a headache.

“There is a textual retelling of this story, did you know?” Ginn pointed to the bookshelf. “I don’t know what is _chaos theory_. Always Dr. Ian Malcolm is talking about chaos theory. I think it is similar to _v’larash_. This is the school of math that is—“ she gestured, apparently struggling to communicate the concept. “Talking about things that have no head? No _cause_.”

“Stochasticity,” Rush guessed.

“I like it very much. Though I don’t think that Dr. Ian Malcolm understands it.”

“No,” Rush said drily. “I would imagine not. Clearly it’s imperative that we assess your educational level and divert your attention to more intellectual matters. Mathematics first, of course. I’ve no notion what sort of formal mathematical background you’ve been given, but it’s almost certainly inadequate.”

“Inadequate for what?” Ginn asked, looking confused.

Rush hadn’t had an idea, but abruptly he did. “Well, obviously I’m going to train you as my replacement. If Stargate Command insists on a backup copy, I’ll give them one, but it’s not going to be some cheeto-fingered joystick-fucker, pardon my language, whose idea of fun is DDOSing Netflix and peddling credit card numbers on the dark web. You speak Ancient?”

“Yes,” Ginn said, looking for some reason more confused, not less. “Of course I do.”

“Excellent; you’re already one up on the joystick-fuckers.” Rush gazed up at the dreary ceiling, which was a cinderblock colour. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He was compiling a list in his head. “We’ll start with number theory; how are you with quadratic reciprocity? Or I suppose the language barrier might be an issue; perhaps I should simply create a test. I assume you prefer base 10?”

“Yes,” Ginn said. “But—“

“I suspect you’re familiar with the idea, but almost certainly not the technical details, of elliptic curves and zeta functions. That’s all right; I’ll dig out my copy of _A Classical Introduction_ ; we can—”

“I don’t understand,” Ginn interrupted, her brow creasing. “You suggested that you did not acquire me for my technical prowess.”

“—No,” Rush said belatedly, disturbed. “I didn’t acquire you for anything. I didn’t _acquire_ you, full stop.”

“Dr. Samantha Carter and Colonel Cameron Mitchell assure me that if I share what I know of the Lucian Alliance, and pledge loyalty to Stargate Command, that is sufficient to secure my release. I do not need to work for you.”

“No,” Rush said again. “No, you don’t.”

She looked at him, questioning. She had very large eyes of a curious colour, which he had noticed even before she hit him. He thought that her eyes did not quite fit the face they were in, which was something that people said about his own. _You disconcert people_ , Gloria had said, _because your eyes are the wrong colour_. He had said, _How can they be the wrong colour? They’re my eyes._ She had smiled, and reached out to trace the arch of his cheekbone. _I don’t know,_ she’d said. _They’re too dark; people find them difficult to look at. It’s like being under a microscope._ When he had asked her if she found them difficult to look at, she’d said no. _No; but I suppose I was always waiting for someone with a high enough lens power, someone who could see my cellular structures._

 _Your mitochondria,_ he had said.

He understood better now what she had meant, and for a brief, strange moment, he wondered what their child would have looked like. He could not imagine it. Their child. Gloria’s and his. He had not wanted children; for many reasons, but in part because the odds were low that any child he and Gloria produced would be like them, and he could not bear the idea of a child who was a stranger. So after all he could appreciate how his parents had felt. _But you would still love it_ , Gloria had said. _You would still love it, Nick; it doesn’t work like that._ He had not been able to bring himself to tell her that it did.

He did not know why he was thinking of this.

He tried not to think about Gloria.

He considered what to say to the girl.

“Have you never done maths for any other reason?” he asked at last. “Only because you were made to?”

Ginn frowned. “I don’t understand the question.”

“You’re correct; you don’t need to work for me. But—“ Now it was he who found himself struggling to communicate a concept. “You’re in a cage,” he said. “A prison, ever-so-slightly nicer than the one you’re used to, or at least without the threat of imminent death, but still a prison, prettied up with a bookshelf and cheap television. This world is full of prisons, cages, of one sort or another. I suspect that every world is. Mathematics is the way out of the cage. I’ve seen your code; I know that surely you feel that. Chipping away at the walls, little by little, with each solution, till eventually the understructure must give way.”

She hesitated, considering him with those eyes: as fixative as amber, and unblinking. “Is this why you wish to solve the nine chevrons?” she asked. “To free yourself from your prison?”

“Perhaps I only want what’s on the other side of the address,” Rush said. “Like the Americans.”

“No.”

“No?”

She shook her head firmly.

“You’re very sure of yourself. Perhaps I feel they ought to be conquered, simply because they exist. Like mountains you climb because they’re there.”

“Solving a problem isn’t conquering it,” she said. “That’s not what it feels like.”

“No.” He looked down, toying with the cuff of his shirt, and wished for a cigarette. “Have you never had a sore tooth and worried at it, or pressed your finger against a bruise, not because you wanted to hurt yourself, but because you needed to know? Because it was a part of your body, and suddenly it was strange, it was foreign, and you wanted to know what would happen if you just—“ He didn’t know what he wanted to say. He spread his fingers in a vague gesture: flowering, exploding.

“But it’s not a part of your body,” she said.

“No. I know that. Of course it isn’t.” He folded his arms across his chest tightly. “Accept an easier answer, then.”

She was still studying him with a faintly wary, clinical air. He presumed that she made all of her decisions by evaluating their likelihood of hurting, the level of tolerance they would require, what she would end up owing on account of them. It was a sophisticated calculus, and one with which he was familiar. How easy if he could have assigned her a book to simply it, but he had not yet found one that streamlined the equations, and besides, the maths was so sensitive to small mistakes in the quantification of the self. That was the really difficult part, and no one else could do it for you. He thought he had not done it particularly well in his own case, but it was much too late to alter the method.

“And you wish me to help you,” Ginn said, sounding as though she were testing the idea out.

“I think you deserve to do maths because you want to see the other side of the wall. Not because someone’s holding a gun to your head.”

“They didn’t hold a gun to my head,” she said. “That’s not how it works.”

“I know how it works,” Rush said.

They looked at each other.

“All right,” Ginn said. “Yes. I will allow you to teach me. But— since we have no books— just for today—“ She bit her lip, suddenly so much younger than she had been a moment before. “Perhaps you could tell me something of what is happening in the world outside instead?”

Rush summoned a wry half-smile. “Outside of the cage?”

She sat on the cot, and pulled her knees up, hugging them close to her. “Yes.”

“You should be glad you’re in here, frankly. Young’s gone quite mad with power.” Rush moved forwards to lean against the desk. “He’s meant to be training me to go offworld. God knows who found _that_ a suitable occupation for the man; perhaps I’m meant to entertain him while he’s trapped in his apartment, drinking himself to death. That seems on par with Stargate Command’s valuation of my person. As far as actual _training_ goes…”

* * *

“How is it possible,” Young asked in a voice that suggested he was barely controlling irritation, “that you can hotwire a car and hack computers, but you can’t remember an acronym for more than ten seconds?”

“I do not _hack computers_ ,” Rush said icily, glaring at him. “I am not a _hacker_. I am a _cryptographer._ I am a _mathematician._ Do you think they give you the bloody Fields medal for arsing about sending rude messages to NASA and creating botnets?”

Young, who was sprawled out on the couch with his right leg elevated against the armrest, rolled his eyes. “You realise that none of that means anything to me, and that I’m not impressed, right?”

“You haven’t bathed in three days; _that_ doesn’t impress _me_.” Rush was leaning against the door to the balcony, wishing fervently for escape— possibly in the form of an meteoroid impact that would obliterate life on Earth. He imagined it: the streak of light, the fireball searing his retinas, the resonance of the explosion he would hear as he died, the relief he would feel at no longer being subject to Young’s ham-handed attempts at education.

“You know what? Give me a break.” Young’s irritation had turned into anger, which Rush preferred, on the whole; irritation was a petty and condescending emotion, while anger he knew inside and out. Anger he could outlast, evade, or circumvent. “I busted my ass, _literally_ , saving you from getting kidnapped.”

“Yes, you were oh-so-very heroic. Mystifying that your response seems to have been to commit yourself to the opposite lifestyle.”

“What, you want me to save your life every day? You’re gonna have to wait till I can walk further than it takes to get from the couch to my bedroom.”

“Farther,” Rush said. “Further refers exclusively to a nonphysical or figurative distance.”

“Jesus Christ!” Young punched a pillow. “Is it the end of the world if I take a couple of days off?”

“A couple of days off and a fistful of pills,” Rush said, infusing the words with exquisite disdain.

Young shoved the stack of documents he’d been holding onto the coffee table, tipping an empty glass over in the process. “Go fuck yourself.”

“Go get the bottle of vodka out of the freezer; you seem to be able to walk well enough to do that.”

“What the fuck is your problem?” Young demanded.

Rush made a bored gesture, uninterested in continuing what was in essence only an iteration of the conversation they’d been having all week.

He had shown up at Young’s door around 10:30 in the morning following the denouement of their impromptu road trip, well-rested and fresh-faced and malicious. Young, on the other hand, had looked bleary and hungover and half-brained, like some sort of lumbering savage. _I told you not before noon_ , he’d said to Rush. Rush had said, _Well, don’t mind me. I thought perhaps you could lecture me in whatever drill sergeant voice you deem appropriate, while I sit at my laptop and carry on with my actual work._ Young had stared at him for a very protracted amount of time while the thought slowly percolated. Then he had leaned an elbow against the doorframe and dropped his head into his hand. _You get_ , he’d said, _that this is serious, right? You get that this is not a joke?_

 _It’s certainly apparent that it’s not a joke to_ you, Rush had said, pushing past Young to set his laptop up at the kitchen island.

This had established a tone for their subsequent encounters from which neither of them seemed inclined to deviate. Rush showed up at whatever time suited him— often whenever he happened to glance at the clock on his computer whilst devising a technical implementation of the Hamiltonian cycle solution, or vaguely contemplating the ninth cypher—and devoted earnest, honest effort to ignoring Young as Young attempted to coerce him into memorizing truly baffling sets of data, such as the phonetic alphabet, and the alphanumeric code for a planet inhabited by swamp-dwelling proto-Goa’uld lizards, and the definitions of things like _H-hour_ and _load signal_. At one point Young had _blindfolded_ him and made him make-believe that he was using a DHD to dial Earth’s address, as though it was playtime and they were pretending to have adventures. _Fuck off_ , Rush had told him, which had not improved the tenor of their interactions.

“My _problem_ ,” Rush said now, crossing the room to his laptop so that Young would be forced to sit up to look at him, “is that you’ve been wearing the same pair of track pants all week, which I find frankly offensive.”

Young said, sounding incredulous, “I have a _broken pelvis_ and _three screws in my spine_. And that’s just the top of the list; I could keep going. As excuses go, I’d say it’s a pretty good one.”

“Oh, yes, yes, I’m very impressed by the extent of your noble sacrifices. But you can’t honestly expect me to believe that this is how you want to live.”

In fact, Rush was interested to learn the extent of Young’s injuries. He had eavesdropped shamelessly on the man’s encounter with Lam, but had gleaned from it only that Young had broken his back at some point, was at risk of further surgery, and dealt on a daily basis with a significant amount of pain. Perhaps gruesomely, he wanted to know _where_ Young was broken, to see the lines of fracture and the scar tissue, to know the weight-bearing capacity of the metal plates. Technically, he thought, there was tactical justification: so much of his time was now spent with Young. He needed to know; he needed to know what Young was made of, the location of his strengths and weaknesses. It made him nervous to think of, and this was of course because he did not like not knowing Young’s vulnerabilities, not out of any anxiety inherent in the driven-home awareness that such vulnerabilities did exist.

He had always been aware that they existed. Young’s own awareness, on the other hand, seemed to come and go, its coming coincident with a slide in existential paralysis of some sort.

“Yeah, well,” Young said shortly, turning away to lie on his side facing the blank television, “we live how we have to. Not how we want to.”

“Bollocks,” Rush said.

“What?”

“I’m politely rejecting the premise of your statement.”

“It didn’t sound very polite.”

Rush ignored him. “We live how we have to in order to _get_ what we want. What are _you_ getting out of this? Pity? _I_ don’t pity you; I find you pathetic, if you must know.”

“Trust me,” Young said, burrowing into the couch, “I know.”

“So you’ve a week off from being a puppet of American imperialism. How does this differ from your previous situation? I fail to see how it translates into a requirement that you slowly forgo all personal hygiene and abstain from consuming anything other than ready meals and liquor, which I strongly suspect is what you’ve been doing, and which—“

“Like you’re some kind of paragon of personal care,” Young snapped, obviously affronted, and reacting like a wounded bear, hunching his shoulders and lumbering to his feet so he could thud on off to his den in the forest and nurse his grievances. “I bet you haven’t even—“

Rush raised his voice to talk over him. “ _And which_ directly imperils my wellbeing, which is the only reason, for your information, that I’m remotely moved to intervene in the question of how you choose to demolish yourself!”

Young raised his own voice even louder. “I bet you haven’t even _slept_ in the last four days; you look like a goddamn vampire, for _your_ information, and at least I don’t pass out in my own apartment when I can’t figure out how the air conditioning works—“

“Yes, well, _you_ look like Frankenstein’s monster!”

“ _And_ you look like a corpse; how long’s it been since _you_ ate a real meal?”

“Frankenstein’s monster was made out of _pieces_ or corpses,” Rush said spitefully. “ _And_ it was badly sewn together, so I’d judge myself to still come out ahead.”

Young looked away abruptly. His hand went to his right hip in what was almost certainly an unintended gesture: fingers digging hard into the flesh for a moment before balling up in a fist. “Yeah, well,” he said in a low, rough voice. “Maybe I am. Nobody asked you to make it your business.”

There was a silence.

Rush fidgeted, struck by uncharacteristic guilt. Or perhaps he was only irritated that he had not intended to strike the blow that he had managed. He would be feeling quite triumphant if he’d meant to, he was sure. There ought to be a term for such a feeling; probably there was one in German. He didn’t know what it was. He attempted to compose a satisfactory substitute in his head, realised that his German was woefully inadequate to the task, and briefly chastised himself for failing to keep up with the language. He had relied on music too much, was the problem. He’d always used opera and Lieder as an ongoing refresher course.

“I slept two days ago,” he said at last, not quite managing not to sound conciliatory. “Or two-and-a-half. I’m a bit unclear on the timing. What day is it today, anyway? Saturday?”

Young looked at him.

“Friday,” Rush guessed again, belatedly.

Young sighed. “It’s Tuesday. You know you’ve got to sleep before you go offworld, right?”

“Yes, yes.”

“I mean it. You make a mistake out there, and it’s not just yourself you’ll be getting killed.”

Rush made the face he typically made upon being subjected to moral lecturing, which was a mulish one. “When is this meant to be happening again?”

“ _Sunday_ ,” Young said, in a tone that implied Rush ought to have known this. “Do you actually listen to anything I say, ever, or do you just stand there multiplying numbers in your head till my lips stop moving?”

“It depends on how irritating I’m finding you at any given moment,” Rush said. “I make the decision case by case. There’s a heuristic. Have you eaten the swordfish I put in the freezer?”

Young looked caught off-guard by the non sequitur, and then somehow simultaneously reluctant and confused. Really, he was so transparent; he allowed his emotions to march across his face. It was a trait that fascinated Rush, a freedom of expression that hard men weren’t popularly supposed to exhibit. In Rush’s experience, it was the hardest men who showed their feelings, though; they wept frankly at football, or else screamed in the streets and tore off their shirts in celebration; anger ran through them like a river that had never known abatement, finding even the notion of dams or locks alien. It was the other sort of man who had to learn how to be subtle, who had learnt early on that emotions came at a cost.

But Young was not a hard man. “I… haven’t really been eating anything except TV dinners,” he admitted, shame-faced.

Case in point: constantly, he rolled himself over for a kicking, as though this was yet another lesson that he’d neglected to have drummed into him. He had no defenses, not the sort that counted; he kicked you back if you kicked him, but not before the kick had happened; he kicked you back something sore precisely because he hadn’t seen it coming, and how, Rush thought, how, how on earth had a man like that fumbled his way through staying alive, how had he learnt neither to be kicked nor to do the kicking, flailing savagely at those who hurt him yet never deriving the formula for how one went about not getting hurt?

He hated Young, he thought conversationally to himself.

He brought the heel of his hand to his brow and let his head rest briefly against it. “Well,” he said, aware that he sounded defeated, “go bathe yourself, then, if you can manage a task a two-year-old is capable of, and rummage up some clothes that a vagrant wouldn’t opt to leave in a rubbish bin, and I will deign to feed you.”

Another startled film reel of emotions ran across Young’s open face. “You’ll deign to feed me?” he repeated.

“Have you acquired a rare form of aphasia? Am I speaking Ancient?”

“—No,” Young said. “No.”

“Then— go. Please. Leave. I find your presence disagreeable on a number of levels, from the personal and the philosophical to the aesthetic and the—“ He failed to think of another level.

Young’s mouth twitched. “A number of levels, huh?”

“Ontological,” Rush said. “On an ontological level.”

“Well, I don’t know what that means,” Young said, scratching at his mop of curls, “but I’ll be sure to make a note of it.”

* * *

For some reason that night Rush set the table, which was of course a bizarre and ridiculous impulse, one arising so close to the line that separated sincere from mocking that he himself could not say in which nation it found its origin. Certainly _Young_ seemed not to know; he stopped, emerging from his bedroom, scrubbed and shaved and giving a very good impression of being clad in a clean shirt, and looked at the dishes, the glasses, the cutlery.

“You haven’t got any napkins,” Rush said belligerently.

“I’ve got—“ Young said, and pointed lamely at the kitchen counter. “Paper ones?”

“Please. Don’t insult my cooking with your fucking paper napkins.” Rush jerked a chair away from the table and dropped into it without any ceremony, seizing his knife and fork. “As though I give a damn if you dribble all over yourself; you’re an embarrassment already.”

He had prepared the swordfish with a garden pea and coconut veloute. They ate it in silence.

“There’s no dessert,” Rush said brusquely when they had finished. “And don’t expect me to cook for you on any sort of continuing basis.”

“Fair enough,” Young said. He looked pensive, or possibly just confused.

* * *

But the next day Young was drunk, which was an extremely passive-aggressive way of endangering Rush’s welfare— “You’re meant to be training me to survive,” Rush said acerbically, “not demonstrating America’s top ten most mediocre methods of self-immolation,” to which Young said, “Why does it matter if I’m drunk? You don’t listen to anything I say when I’m sober,” to which Rush replied, “There’s always the off-chance that, like a monkey at a typewriter, you’ll contrive to produce a single moment of insight, or rather that the universe will contrive to deliver it to me through you.”

It couldn’t be tolerated, at any rate, so Rush— not entirely sure what time it was, but suspecting it was morning— resentfully produced a plate of crepes to be served with bittersweet chocolate caviar, passionfruit, and raspberry creme fraiche. The goal of this was to soak up the alcohol, though he had also thought that perhaps he could escape whilst Young was eating, thereby avoiding both the tedious necessity of eating himself and any subsequent lecture on military acronyms. But after a few bites Young said awkwardly, his eyes fixed on his plate, “Mitchell says you ordered a bunch of books for that Lucian girl. That you’ve been going to see her.”

Rush stared at his own plate. “Perhaps Colonel Mitchell is the Lucian spy. It would explain a great deal about his level of interest in my business.”

Young sighed. “Can we not joke about that?”

“Fine. Yes.”

“Yes?”

“I’m continuing her education.”

Young nodded. He still wasn’t looking at Rush. “You think you can trust her?”

Rush pierced a single sphere of caviar with the tine of a fork and watched it dissolve into liquid. If someone had asked him to broadly characterise the nature of his interests, he thought, he would have said that he was interested in how things changed into other things. Cyphertext became plaintext, liquids became solids, gas became liquid, growth became rot. Perhaps he was interested because he didn’t believe that things did change, not really; they carried the traces of their previous forms, not like fingerprints, but more like programming that could never quite be deleted, deep algorithms to which they were likely to revert. He was searching for a way, he supposed, to circumvent this.

“What is trust?” he said, finally glancing up at Young. “It’s an assumption based on the predictability of processes that are not, by their nature, predictable, or else we’d have to use a different word than _trust_. We observe some small part of a system and take the whole to be self-similar, even though we logically know that it’s too complex for us to command, too variable-rich, too sensitive, that even by trusting or not-trusting we might alter the nature of currents moving within it, its own gravitational effects—“

He had lost Young, he saw. Young, who trusted or didn’t trust in great bursts of instinct, without having to justify why he did so.

And, indeed: “I don’t think it’s that complicated,” Young said. “I think maybe you overthink things.”

“She likes _Jurassic Park_ ,” Rush said tiredly. “Does that answer your question?”

“ _I_ like _Jurassic Park_.”

“I don’t find this surprising.”

“Hey, don’t knock it,” Young said, and pointed his fork at Rush. “You know what? Life finds a way.”

* * *

They continued eating together on a daily basis, to Rush’s bemusement and frustration. The next day, Young was sober. And he was sober the day after that. Rush grudgingly shaved and put on shoes. Young organised his dishes in the cabinets. Table napkins appeared, without comment, in a ludicrous French rooster print.

* * *

It was enough to give Rush whiplash, emerging from the extremely dark and noiseless cave of his apartment, into the part of the world where humans breathed and moved and made noises that had semantic content, where semantic content was something that was not withheld— available only to he who could finally crack the hard shell of the riddle, solve the question of how and why (at the basest of levels) someone said something and meant something else.

He preferred code, which he could contemplate in silence, the clean digits flowing forth like water from a stone that he alone had struck. He had begun transcribing the ninth cypher onto his living room wall in permanent marker, something that was almost certainly forbidden— implicitly if not explicitly— by his tenancy contract. The physical act of forming the numbers seemed to centre something in him that otherwise threatened to grow restless, something that would not let him sleep, a storm of electricity his body could only barely contain. Hours would pass while he stood and stared at the rows and rows of -1s and 1s and 0s. Perhaps, he thought, there was something that he had missed: something very big and obvious that a computer could not look for. A shape that would show him what to do next.

Sometimes he looked across the table and imagined Young speaking in trits of information, the tones of his voice rendered as code.

He wondered if Young would be easier to understand if this were the case. If Young did not talk like a human.

On the very first day, before the meals had started, before he had even been to see Ginn, Young had said, with the air of one extending a hand to stroke a sleeping panther, “Do you want to, like… talk about any of this? The gene thing, or…?”

Rush had stared at him flatly until the silence became uncomfortable.

“Right,” Young had said resignedly. “I get it. You don’t want to talk.”

So they had not talked about it.

And Rush had preferred that.

He preferred not to think about it at all.

* * *

On the day that had been allotted for the offworld mission, Young was cleared to drive Rush to the base. To drive him to the base for his _mission. Mission_ , as though he were heading off into some sort of armed conflict, instead of running a simple technical experiment on a DHD. Probably they would insist on surrounding him with stone-faced men wearing camouflage and little caps, men carrying rifles and wearing lots of extraneous pouches. Rush wasn’t averse to a man in uniform, but he preferred them not to be either interchangeable or trigger-happy, as the Stargate Program’s lower ranks tended to be.

He considered and dismissed the idea of asking Young what was in all of the little pouches.

Outside the window, the mountains were shrouded in mist.

It was the first truly chilly day of autumn, which reminded him of Britain in ways he liked and ways he did not like. There was never as much water in the air here; clouds in Britain seemed to move at a much closer level, as though they were intimate with the earth, while here the ardour had been replaced by a wary remoteness. Every type of distance in America was more distant. But once or twice a year there was this touch of cold, this crispness, uncomfortably familiar, a reminder that he came from somewhere.

“So what is this planet like, then?” he asked Young, feigning lazy inattention and balancing his boots against the dash. “The one they’re sending me to?”

Young’s jaw tightened. “I don’t know,” he said, not sounding happy about it. “They’re trying to keep all the information under wraps so nobody can leak it. I don’t even know who they’re sending you with. Landry put a team together, here and on the _Odyssey_ , people who’re supposed to have been ruled out in terms of Lucian contact—“

“Thoughtful of them,” Rush remarked.

“I don’t like it.”

“Clearly.”

“You should’ve been trained, _really_ trained, not just by me in my kitchen—“

“Thank you for acknowledging the inadequacies of your tutelage.”

“Everyone’s trying so goddamn hard to keep everything about you off the record, and I get it, I do, but they just—“ Young shook his head. “It’s easy to miss the obvious risks, you know?”

Rush stared at the window, seeing his ghostly face overlaid on the passing landscape. “I didn’t know you cared.”

“Uh, I’d prefer if you didn’t _die._ ” Young’s hands had tightened on the steering wheel.

Rush hunched lower in his seat, and deliberately scuffed the dashboard with a heel.

“Could you lay off my truck?” Young asked, exasperation replacing worry.

“Don’t get sentimental,” Rush said.

* * *

But Young’s mood improved when they arrived, and he discovered who it was that would be accompanying Rush.

“Sheppard,” he said in a tone of satisfaction, as he lead Rush into what was— God, it couldn’t be; surely he had not sunk to such a depth; but there it was, and apparently he had, and the next step on his Dantean descent as a person was to encounter an actual locker room, here, now, in the flesh.

It stank of homoerotic bonhomie and desperation. Young, of course, was opening one of the lockers, this being his natural setting and native terrain.

“Who is Sheppard?” Rush asked.

Young threw a stack of clothing at him, which Rush fumbled. “Colonel Sheppard? From Atlantis? He’s a friend. Apparently he was on Earth anyway; the geeks at Area 51 needed his help with some Ancient control chair project they’re working on, because of the whole Ancient gene thing.”

Rush paused, and then absentmindedly began collecting the various items of clothing where they had fallen: camouflage, more camouflage, and a black t-shirt. “Remind me of Colonel Sheppard’s first name?”

Young gave him a strange look. “Uh… John. Why; does that matter?”

“No. Of course not.” _JoSh_ , Rush thought. He wondered if Colonel Sheppard was aware that he too had been reduced to not-quite-a-name. “Am I meant to wear these appalling garments?”

“Yes,” Young said. “And we’re running late. So get changed.”

He turned his back, which at first Rush found quite disappointing, as there was nothing simpler or more satisfying than getting under the skin of a man who was ashamed of his attraction to other men. But as Rush shed his clothes he found himself unexpectedly glad of the privacy. There was something about Young that made him conscious of his body, in quite a neutral but a nagging way; he was aware of their proximity to each other, always, or their distance, aware that Young was or could be looking at him, caught off guard by the idea that he belonged to the set of things that could be looked at. He resented the reminder and resented Young for delivering it.

“Am I going to be allowed my own array of those fascinating little pouches?’ he asked as he pulled the black t-shirt over his head, trying to cover his discomfort with Young’s presence.

Young huffed in amusement. “Considering a full combat loadout weighs about as much as you do—“

Midway through the sentence, and before Rush was quite prepared for it to happen, he turned.

Rush stilled in the act of tugging the t-shirt down, frozen for a moment, then slowly reached for the camouflage coat. His hands had turned clumsy. There was something in Young’s expression that startled him. Young seemed equally startled; he blinked for a moment, his mouth falling slightly open as though he had meant to continue his sentence but had been caught between paradigms shifting, diverted by the sudden inapplicability of his words.

They regarded each other.

Haltingly, Young stepped forward and pulled the oversized coat over Rush’s shoulders. His hands rested there for a moment.

Rush swallowed.

Young stepped back hastily and brushed his hands against his trousers, as though trying to clean off something that had adhered to him. A crease in his brow hinted at some inner confusion.

“I’m sure you’ve got everything you need,” he said.

* * *

The gateroom was abuzz; someone had already loaded a large amount of gear onto a cart of some sort that was standing, waiting, on the ramp, surrounded by predictably large men milling about with their guns. The noise level was high, but as Rush entered, he could hear an authoritative voice drawl, “Okay, let’s pack it out!”

The voice came from a mid-sized man in a black uniform with a hawkish face, whose hair resembled military standard only slightly more than did Young’s. Rush presumed that this was Colonel Sheppard. He looked like the sort of man who ought to be possessed of alien genes— attractive, boyish, and with an easy swagger. No doubt he engaged in dashing adventures and flew airplanes at irresponsible speeds.

“Hey, Shep,” Young said, leading Rush over. “Got time for introductions?”

Sheppard turned. “Young,” he said. The very faintest print of startlement showed on his face, with a wry and minute twist to his mouth that suggested— what? Impossible to determine. “What’re you doing hanging around here? Don’t make me kick you out of my gateroom.”

“Your gateroom, huh?” Young returned.

Sheppard shrugged with a faux-bashfulness that didn’t reach his watchful eyes. “They let me play with it once in a while, just as long as I give it back in the same condition I got it.”

“Yeah, well, here’s something else I want you to give back.” Young laid a hand on Rush’s shoulder. “Rush— Sheppard. Sheppard— this is Rush.”

“I’m not a toy you’re lending him,” Rush said shortly, and knocked Young’s hand away.

Sheppard said, “Nice to meet you. I’ve only heard… well, I’ve heard things.”

“Have you,” Rush said.

He wondered again if Sheppard knew. About the cells. The genes. The initials.

It wasn’t only the faux-bashfulness that had not reached Sheppard’s eyes. As Rush watched, he saw to his curiosity that none of Sheppard’s expressions seemed to. His eyes were a separate region of his face. Rush could not immediately discern what they might be expressing.

“All nonessential personnel, please clear the gate area,” the tannoy announced.

“Nonessential,” Young said. “That’s me, I guess.”

He had a semi-frozen expression on his face when Rush turned to squint at him. An unconvincing smile, like something dead and caught in amber.

Sheppard tossed off a lazy salute. “Catch you on the other side.”

Young was already backing away, not looking at Rush. He said, very fast, “See you, hotshot.”

Wait, Rush wanted to say. He felt that there was something— some last-minute instruction— that he had been waiting for, something he must have missed. Now it was too late; Young hadn’t said it. Rush was discombobulated; he didn’t know how to respond.

He thought that at the very least he could not allow Young to have the last word, but Young was gone already, out of earshot.

“Don’t call me ‘hotshot,’” he said anyway, in an oddly unsteady tone, under his breath.

* * *

The gate dialed.

Rush had seen the schematics and envisioned its action, but he had not imagined that it would look so much like a lock. How had they missed it, all those soldiers, scientists, engineers who had unearthed it and who so very many times had watched it spin and stop as though searching for a combination that it could not arrive at? How had they not seen it? Perhaps they had not been the sort of people who saw the world in terms of locks. It took a certain mindset, which he supposed the Ancients had had.

Turning and turning… It reminded him of something.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre.

“This is a walk in the park,” Sheppard said conversationally, over his shoulder. His hand was resting on his gun. “For me, anyway. In and out, nobody shooting at us, no robots, no psychic space vampires… They tell you anything about this planet we’re headed to?”

Mute, Rush shook his head. He was finding the motion of the gate hypnotic.

Sheppard shrugged. “Apparently there’s a beach,” he said.

The seventh chevron locked, and the wormhole formed: explosive, a fluid surge like spacetime reaching out to touch them, long fingers of water-that-was-not-water grasping, spuming, effortful, and then— sullen— receding again into an unsettling and placid lake.

Rush looked at it.

He felt he was alone on the dais.

He could— _hear_ something, he thought.

A sound not meant for anyone else. Only for him.

He could not describe it.

It was there, and he thought that it had always been there, just beyond the range of what he was capable of hearing.

He stretched out his hand, and was startled to find that he had walked forward without conscious volition. He was at the very threshold of the crack in the world that shivered, silver, mobile and seductive, in front of him. He could almost, but not quite, put his palm flat against its surface.

“What’re you waiting for?” Sheppard said. He was standing a pace behind Rush. His face was unreadable. “Nothing stopping you.”

“No,” Rush said. “I know there’s not.”

He took a sharp breath, and plunged through.

* * *

He rematerialised— the cloud of particles that was his body recohering as object, but _how did it know_ , that millions-of-years-old chunk of crystals and circuits, _how did it know_ what was him and not him?— on a beach, but not, he thought, the sort that Sheppard had been expecting.

It was night. Or not night, he amended, but twilight— a late twilight, very blue and cold. Two moons hung in the sky, one very large and visibly cratered, the other smaller or more distant, a cool crescent in the dark.

The coast was a line of pale cliffs devoid of greenery, its stretch of sand studded with rocks of varying sizes, some as big as Rush’s head. The gate itself emerged from the shallows of the water; it had at one time, Rush thought, been atop a high platform of some sort, with stairs that approached it, but over time the platform had sunk or been eroded, until now only the worn and tilted edge of a single step emerged from the sand. Low waves lapped over it and licked at Rush’s boots, smelling of— nothing. Salt, perhaps. Something chemical.

He moved away from the gate and knelt, scraping sand away from one of the larger rocks. It was printed, he saw, with fossils: not the spindly limbs and elegant spirals he might have expected on the coastline of Dorset, but something alien in structure— toothed and hexagonal, but clearly life, or what had once been life. The other rocks were the same; he picked from the wet sand a single small petrified item, either flora or fauna, with a coiled central ridge.

He smelled nothing growing, he thought. Nothing rotting. No kelp or moss or fish in rock pools, beached and left dying when the tide had gone out again.

It was that which brought home to him how very far from Earth he was, more even than the double moon or the unfamiliar stars overhead. Something had been alive here once, but it was not alive any longer.

He waited to feel the distance, but did not.

The team had come through the gate behind him.

Sheppard was clicking his radio. “ _Odyssey_ ,” he said. “You read me? This is Sheppard.”

The radio crackled. “We read you, Shep,” a woman’s voice said. “It’s Nasir. We’re in stable orbit around the planet. What’re you doing back in this neck of the woods?”

“Oh, you know,” Sheppard said. “I was hoping for some surfing, but it doesn’t look much like surfing weather.”

“I don’t know about that,” Nasir said. “My guys say you could be looking at a heck of a high tide with those two moons; they’re trying to get a read on it. How far are you from the shoreline?”

“Uh—“ Sheppard lifted one of his boots up and grimaced at the sand clinging to its sole. “Yeah, about that. We’re kind of right on top of it. Can you keep me updated on the tide situation?”

“Sure thing,” Nasir said.

Rush had wandered over to the DHD, the base of which was set in water. It did not look like he had expected. It did not look like Ancient technology, or like he imagined Ancient technology was supposed to look. It was like a piece of costume jewellery: dull, primitive, and badly-designed, with a paste-ruby button at its centre. He did not like it. He had the urge to turn away, to shield his eyes, as though it were physically painful for him to look at; something about it made his head ache.

“It looks—” he said out loud, trying to get a feel for the words. “Wrong.”

He had not realised that Sheppard was behind him. Sheppard said, “You think so?”

“Don’t you?”

There was a silence.

Rush turned to find Sheppard considering him. “Like a film reel running backwards,” Sheppard said. “The DHDs in Pegasus— they’re not like this.”

They stood, their eyes drawn to and yet repelled by the partially-sunken structure. There was an odd synchrony in their stance, their gaze. It made Rush feel uneasy. He had been prepared to dismiss Sheppard with the rest of the team, whom he had hardly glanced at since arriving on the planet. Sheppard was there to shoot things. He hadn’t even, like Young, the virtue of— well, Young had no virtues, surely, but all the same, he was difficult to dismiss.

Sheppard, through some alternative means, managed to make his presence felt.

“I’ll have to take off the panels on the base,” Rush said eventually. “I don’t suppose you could lend a hand?”

Sheppard shot him an amused look. “That’s not really what I’m here for. Plus, I mean, we did go to all the trouble of getting you an engineer.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the team spreading outwards in the low surf. One of them was not strapped up like a suicide bomber with guns and grenades and whatever it was that went in the pouches, which Rush hadn’t noticed; then again, the man was exquisitely forgettable: weak-jawed and floppy-haired and nervous-looking, just as you’d expect from an engineer.

Rush made an impatient gesture. “Well, send him over; I’m certain he’s fit for nothing more than manual labour.”

Sheppard’s mouth quirked. “You know, I thought the briefing I got on you had to be an exaggeration. Turns out, not so much.”

“Briefing?” Rush said, narrowing his eyes. “What _briefing?_ What did they say about me? Who was responsible for this briefing?”

But Sheppard had already turned to fetch the engineer.

Brody was his name, the engineer— Adam Brody, which he announced as though he felt it was a realistic thing to expect Rush to remember. Rush hoped the incredulous silence with which he greeted this information was sufficient to communicate that this was not the case.

“What I require from you, Dr. Brody—“ Rush said.

“Uh,” the engineer said. “It’s— just Mr. Brody.”

Rush closed his eyes and touched two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “I don’t care,” he said. “Please speak to me as infrequently as possible. Confine yourself to lifting the things I tell you lift.”

“You got it,” the engineer said.

He did, at least, prove very adept at lifting, and didn’t see fit to object when it was necessary for both himself and Rush to kneel in the low surf in order to pry loose the DHD’s bulky and broadly ornamented panels. And it was not inefficient to have someone capable of monitoring a laptop while Rush worked on interfacing the DHD’s array of crystals with the USB connector that Dr. Perry had devised to use for such a purpose in her work. To do so required that Rush lie on his back in the wet sand, affixing individual wires to the bases of the exposed crystals with a sequence of miniature clamps. He had expected this to be easier than it was, or at least to take less time; he was always unprepared, he admitted to himself with some irritation, for reality’s epiphenomenal effects: the sand that gritted up his palms and the cables that slipped through his wet fingers, this night-on-another-planet that made it hard for him to see.

“Guess this isn’t that much of a walk in the park for you,” Sheppard said after a while, eyeing where Rush, half-soaked, was trying to thread a clamp up between two circuits. “Sorry about that. Usually the places we gate to look pretty much the same. Lots of rain; lots of forests.”

“Aren’t I lucky.” Rush was still struggling to reach small upper crystals. He squinted. His glasses had specks of water on them.

“So what’s the deal? You flip the switch on this thing, blow up the DHD, and the _Odyssey_ takes us all home?”

Rush got to his feet, holding the bundled leads that ended in the USB connector. He tried to brush some of the sand off his camouflage trousers, with little success, before abandoning the endeavour. “You’ve been talking to Colonel Young.”

“Naw, me and Young haven’t kept in touch for ages. But General Landry seemed pretty sure there was gonna be explosions.”

“Sorry to disappoint.” Rush crowded the engineer out of the way in order to access his laptop, and inserted the USB connector.

“So no explosions?”

“Well, I can’t really promise that.” Somewhat distracted by the DHD in his peripheral vision, its persistent unwillingness to resolve into the right shape, Rush pulled up the program that ought to direct current throughout the sequence of crystals. “I’m initiating an electrical charge that will travel through the DHD’s seventy-four crystals in a specific Hamiltonian cycle; that is—“

“I know what a Hamiltonian cycle is,” Sheppard said.

Rush paused and glanced over at him, startled.

Sheppard shrugged. “So what then?”

“Then,” Rush said, “we see what happens.”

He keyed in the command and sent it.

There was a long moment of waiting, punctuated by a sense of dropping pressure, as though the planetary weather systems had suddenly altered. Rush felt the hair on his arms prickle. Sheppard shivered and glanced over his shoulder, looking edgy and bringing his rifle up.

It wasn’t the pressure, Rush realised. It was most likely a sound, some sort of infrasound that the DHD was emitting— a frequency too low for humans to hear, but one that could nevertheless be detected by the body, and that was rapidly increasing in pitch. There, now, was the first faint tremble of a hum, something causing the loose sand further up the beach to skitter.

It was going to be loud, he thought. When they could hear it, it was going to be loud.

He tilted his head. He was trying to understand its pitch.

“Rush,“ Sheppard said, sounding disturbed. “What—“

“I don’t know,” Rush said. He was only half-listening. He felt light-headed, abstracted.

The DHD was shaking.

“ _Rush_ ,” Sheppard said again.

But Rush was not listening at all by this point, or rather he was _listening_ , but he was not listening to Sheppard; he was listening to the rising pitch, which like the gate was turning, turning, in search of a certain combination that would unlock all the things that had been hidden from it, and he knew this because _there_ it settled and _turned_ and was suddenly descending, and _there_ it turned again and ratcheted up, and someone was speaking to him, but he could not understand their voice because there was no melody to it; it wavered at or about the same tone, and so it did not interest him, because how could it have semantic content?

The sound turned, and turned again.

It was very loud now.

Someone was shouting.

Turning—

               and turning—

                                    the centre cannot—

He was waiting for the note that was no longer there.

The note that was not there yet.

A ghost note. No. Notes.

Of course it should not have surprised him. Look at the constellation glyphs. Waiting to be depressed like the keys of an instrument. Laid out in circles on the DHD.

This sound had always waited for him.

It grew louder and still it was turning.

There was a general sense of waiting and then—

Sheppard tackled him facedown into the water as the DHD shattered.

Shards of metal and glass rained down from overhead.

Rush struggled for a moment, unable to breathe and panicking at the sensation of the water. He did not _like_ water; he did not like to be held underwater; and he could not _breathe_ ; and the water did not taste like water; it was cold and flaky with odd asteroidal minerals, and why did Sheppard not understand that he could not _breathe?_

But perhaps Sheppard did understand, because he was standing and heaving Rush up out of the water. “Sorry,” he said. “I figured it was better than taking a chunk of DHD to the face.”

Rush did not respond, because he was bent double and wracked with coughing.

Sheppard struck him on the back several times in a manner that was apparently intended to be helpful. “Well, turns out Landry was right about the explosions,” he said.

He seemed distracted, and when Rush at last was able to stand, the reason for this became evident.

The casing of the DHD was gone, scattered across the shoreline in twisted fragments. What remained was an internal structure that resembled a softly glowing and silver-white plant, its luminous roots twisting up from the shallow, dark water before splitting into an array of symmetrical branches, each one tipped with the calligraphic stroke of a glyph. The crystals that had looked so out-of-place and so cartoonish when plugged into their dark panels now seemed to have grown where they were set, glimmering in faint strokes of gold and fire and tourmaline.

“Fuck _me_ ,” one of the soldiers on the team whispered.

Rush found that he was holding his breath. The distance that he had not previously felt was there now; he felt that he was very far away from all that he had ever been. The sepulchral sky and the heavy moon with its distant cousin, the pale sand rendering up its harvest of ancient dead, the white drift of foam on the face of the water, and this icy, almost achiral alien plant— all these combined to cause him a sense of dissociation so profound that for a moment he was convinced that he had left his body, though he had not taken up any other material position; he simply… was not.

He stepped forward and touched one of the glyphs that rested at the ends of the branches. The metal was not cold, or any temperature, really. It was the same colour, he thought, that he had been. In the smoke. In the darkness. When he had been frightened.

At his touch the glyph flared, as though it recognised him.

Sheppard was once more standing at his shoulder. “It looks right,” Sheppard said quietly. “To me. Now. Does it to you?”

Rush said, “Yes.”

“You wanted it to decode something for you, right?” Sheppard too had reached out to touch one of the branches. Its light pulsed faintly under his hand.

“Yes,” Rush said again.

“Sometimes, with Ancient tech, you can sort of— communicate with it. If you ask it, it’ll give you what you want. Not in words, I mean, but— it understands you.”

Rush closed his eyes against the uncanny illumination and thought about the cypher, about the chevron, about the spinning gate; about the prison wall he had described to Ginn, and the crack in the wall, the way out, the unlocking; _it was a part of your body,_ he had said, _and suddenly it was strange, it was foreign, and you wanted to know what would happen_ ; and he wanted to know what would happen; he wanted to hear the note; he wanted to understand—

Light rose off the glyphs, but it was not light, because he could not see it.

A shudder of some force seized him, starting at his fingertips.

Alarmed, he reached blindly for Sheppard. Their hands tangled together.

The world undid itself around them.

“Rush—“ Sheppard said.

Or did not say, because neither of them had a mouth or ears or a voice.

Nevertheless Rush was listening to something in the darkness.

“Yes,” he whispered to it.


	19. Chapter 19

Young had gone through a lot of psych testing after the Sest Bet mission, when he’d gotten out of the hospital but was still in rehab. The service had been _so concerned_ about how he was doing, which— _everyone_ had been _so concerned_ at the time: Emily, David, his brothers, Mitchell; and all their sincere but so, so tiring concern had gradually blended into one, a globe-shaped, massive, unbearable weight he had to carry, like the statue of Atlas at Rockefeller Center that you saw at Christmas on TV. The only way to get through the day was to close himself in a shell of politeness, a thin mother-of-pearl pretense of optimism. It was as true with the service as it was with anyone else. So he’d sat in the sessions with the psychologists and made small talk, and mostly (he suspected) gave them the impression that he was too dumb for there to be any real depth to his questions or fears. You always heard about “progress” in therapy; well, that was his progress: he saw how much of his life had been spent convincing other people he was stupid because he couldn’t dig all his thoughts out of where they were embedded like shrapnel in him.

The only test that gave him problems was the inkblot one, because there was always a point when you _did_ see something in the inkblots, and after that it was hard to unsee it again. A splotch of black became a car crash, or a devouring serpent, or a rotting apple, or an eyeless face screaming something that no one could hear.

He thought about this when he had left the gateroom and found himself leaning against a wall in the hallway just beyond it, staring absently at the ceiling, his head tipped back.

 _Considering a full combat loadout weighs about as much as you do—_ he’d said, and he’d turned around to see Rush tugging his black t-shirt down over his narrow torso, and he had felt—

He hadn’t wanted Rush to go.

The inkblot of Rush’s body had resolved into a shape that Young wasn’t expecting, something his first instinct was to protect. There was nothing he could do, of course; even if he could have said _Don’t go_ , or maybe _Fuck the ciphers_ , Rush wouldn’t have listened to him. And he couldn’t say it in the first place, because he couldn’t dig deep enough in himself to get the idea out, as always.

But he couldn’t unsee it.

His chest felt tight. He closed his eyes and knocked his head gently against the concrete, wishing he were drunk.

“Pull yourself together,” he whispered.

The nearest light in the hallway buzzed.

“Hi,” Daniel Jackson said.

Young opened his eyes again.

Jackson was standing in front of him, looking apologetic— though that was the way Jackson tended to look. He was holding a stack of very thick folders, the topmost of which had a peeling sticker on it that said ICARUS.

“I’m guessing you didn’t just happen to be on your way to the gateroom,” Young said.

“Nope,” Jackson said, popping the _p_ like somebody’d almost certainly told him at some point was cute. It wasn’t. “I talked to Jack. And then I thought I should talk to you. I think you’d agree that we’ve got a lot to go over. Is now a good time?”

“Not really,” Young said.

Jackson didn’t seem fazed. “We should talk anyway.”

“Usually the guy in charge of the project is the one giving the briefings,” Young pointed out.

“Yes. Well. That’s… problematic, in this case, for obvious reasons.” Jackson adjusted his glasses and looked away.

“From what I hear, _you_ would’ve thought it was problematic even before Colonel Telford almost got killed by the Lucian Alliance.”

Jackson said, “Again.”

It caught Young off guard. “What?”

“Before Colonel Telford almost got killed by the Lucian Alliance _again_. I mean— this is the second time, isn’t it? Isn’t that how you got injured in the first place? This is the second time he’s been captured. The second time he’s come back.”

“I don’t like what you’re implying,” Young said.

Jackson said evenly, “I’m not implying anything. Just making an observation.”

“ _You weren’t there.”_ Young had stepped very close to Jackson, so that their faces were almost in line— Jackson a little bit taller, and therefore at an advantage.

But Jackson flinched back first. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that, given my position. I think everyone’s still a little on edge.”

“Yeah,” Young said, but didn’t feel particularly placated.

“I apologize. Really.” Jackson hugged his armful of folders to his chest like a little kid carrying a stack of homework. “Let’s get a cup of coffee.”

“I want to talk to him,” Young said.

“To…?” Jackson’s eyebrows rose in an expression of polite inquiry.

“To David.”

“Ah.”

“You’re giving me your side; doesn’t it seem fair that he gets to do the same?”

Jackson said delicately, “I wouldn’t really call it a _side_.” He was picking at the peeling edge of the ICARUS sticker.

“Well, whatever you’d call it.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Carolyn thinks she’s getting somewhere with the blood test; apparently the brainwashing agent they use leaves traces in the cellular…” Jackson trailed off and made a face. “I don’t know what I’m talking about. But _she_ seems to know. Till then, you might have to have a guard in the room with you. But I’ll talk to Jack about it.”

“I appreciate it,” Young said. He felt less angry now, and a little bit foolish. He didn’t know where he got off taking Jackson on, especially when he’d spent most of the last week drunk as hell. “Really. I do. It’s just— he’s a friend.”

“Right,” Jackson said quietly, staring down at the folders. “Well. I know how that goes.”

“But you’re right. I should hear your side. No one’s told me a goddamn thing, actually. Although I’m getting that they haven’t told _Rush_ a goddamn thing either, which seems…” Young searched for a word that would describe how it seemed, and couldn’t find one.

“Yes,” Jackson said after a long silence. “It does, doesn’t it.”

Young said nothing.

With a slight grimace, Jackson adjusted the folders. “Well,” he said, “come on. I don’t want to have to lug these around all day.”

 

* * *

The mess was mostly empty, only the very last of the lunch crowd still lingering over their plastic cups of Jell-O. Young was surprised at first, then remembered that it was Sunday: none of the five-day-a-week desk jockeys would be on base. But Jackson still chose to sit at a table in a far corner of the room, where he proceeded to stare down at the coffee in his styrofoam cup with a pensive expression while Young stirred a spoon for longer than he had to, watching the final traces of sugar dissolve as he tried to think of something to say.

“You knew,” he said at last. “When you helped me move last month. You knew already.”

Jackson glanced up. “That Jack was going to offer you Icarus? No. How could I? David was still here.”

“He’s still here _now_ ,” Young said, nettled. “But the two of you were looking for his second.”

“People always talk about me and Jack like we’re a team, but technically we’re not anymore, you know.” Jackson took a quick sip of his coffee and grimaced. “We never were, really. We weren’t _the two of you_. Not like that. We don’t think the same thoughts. We don’t have the same problems. We’re just friends who occasionally… agree about certain concerns.”

“Like whatever it is that’s going on with Rush.”

“Yes. And yes,” Jackson said. “I knew already.”

“You didn’t want me for the job.”

Jackson had started to pick with restless fingers at the rim of his coffee cup. “I didn’t _not_ want you. I wanted you to meet him. First. I wanted you to meet him first. Before anyone talked to you about the project.”

“Why?” Young asked.

“Because David didn’t,” Jackson said. “No one did. To them he was, first and foremost, a set of genetic factors. You can’t meet a set of genetic factors. You can’t get to know it.” He paused for a moment and let his gaze drift to the stretch of wall beside them, like he wished there was a window in it, or was imagining there was, instead of all the structural weight of the Mountain. “The thing is— I used to wonder why Jack was so good at stepping back from a situation when it suited him. It was like he had a switch in his head, and he could just stop seeing a person as a person, and just see them as, I don’t know, a paper target, like that picture with the duck and the rabbit.”

Young said, “I haven’t seen it.”

“The duck-rabbit? It’s famous. An optical illusion.” Jackson fumbled in his pocket for a pen, and produced a half-chewed Bic that he had to give a good scribble to get going. He used it to scrawl the wobbly outline of a bird’s head and beak on his crumpled paper napkin. “The composition doesn’t change…” He turned the napkin sideways, and suddenly Young could see the rabbit: its two long ears where the bird’s beak had been. “But at some point you just… _see_ it. Or _un_ see it.”

“Like inkblots,” Young said.

“Yes.” Jackson stared down at the napkin. “Years ago, back in the early days, it used to make me so furious. Jack would say I was being a bleeding-heart, that I cared too much, even though when _he_ cared, of course, it was all strictly logical— just a man playing by a man’s rules. I didn’t understand for a long time that he was doing what he’d been trained to. All of you, you’re so good at it, because you have to be. It’s how you survive; it’s how you get turned into colonels. If I told you that you had to shoot someone to stop Earth from being destroyed by the Ori, you’d—“

There was a pause, indicating that the unfinished pause was not rhetorical.

“Do it,” Young said. “Without hesitation. Of course I would.”

“And what if the person you had to shoot was Rush?” Jackson tilted his head and looked at Young with a delicate, unreadable expression.

Young didn’t answer. His eyes had come to rest somewhat randomly on a spray of spilled sugar. It seemed to form patterns, like tea leaves. Inkblots again. He thought that Jackson was wrong; once you saw something, you could never really unsee it; what the service trained you to do was to put it at the back of your head, so that it wasn’t in front of you when you took the shot. They trained you to do that because there were times when _someone_ had to take the shot. Or take the bullet. And that was what he was there for, what they were all there for. He was sure O’Neill felt the same. Everything you did in this world made ghosts out of the roads you’d left untaken, the lives they led to that you hadn’t lived. Not just killing, although its ghosts were more insistent. It was all just a question of what skin you could stand to walk around in.

 _Hell if I’m gonna let you haunt me, Young_ , David had said.

Jackson said very neutrally, into the silence, “David would do it. Like you said. Without hesitation.”

Young said sharply, “David’s a better airman than I am.”

“Yes,” Jackson said. “He is. You asked why, and that’s why. Because he’s a better airman than you are. Because he sees a set of genetic factors, and that’s not what you see.”

Young picked up his coffee and threw back a swallow, feeling savagely frustrated. “I don’t even know what genetic factors have to do with it in the first place. _Or_ why you told him; why the hell did you tell him? You realize they could bring you up on charges for that?”

“They won’t,” Jackson said shortly. “No one will. I’m the safest person in the program, frankly, because no one wants to go up against Jack, and everyone knows that if the person _Jack_ had to shoot to stop the Earth from being destroyed by the Ori was—“ He stopped, pressing his lips tightly together, and looked away. “I don’t know if that’s true,” he said quietly after a moment. “But that’s what they think.”

It was a surprisingly intimate admission from someone that Young didn’t know all that well. He wondered if anyone knew Jackson, really. Even O’Neill or Carter. He’d never really thought of Jackson being much like Rush, but maybe they had that in common— their singular aloneness in the world.

When it didn’t seem like Jackson was going to keep talking, Young said, “And you had to do something.” It was a guess, but he thought it was a good guess.

“Yes.” Jackson had resumed picking Styrofoam flecks off his cup. “Because I couldn’t figure out any other way to stop what was happening. And I had to stop it.”

“Stop _what?_ ”

Jackson’s gaze strayed towards the stack of folders. “It’s a fairly open secret,” he said, “that no one knows what’s at the other end of the nine-chevron address. Mostly people assume that we have no details at all. But that’s not… _entirely_ true.”

Young frowned. “Isn’t it?”

“One of the repositories of Ancient knowledge we encountered contained a reference to it. Whatever the destination is, it must have already been old then. The Ancients must have lost most of what they’d once known about it. They considered it a serious risk to take, a place you were supposed to go only in a time of great desperation. There’s some reason to think—“ He paused. “It’s a place, of course it’s a place, but they also refer to it as a goal or mission, one that’s only possible for a person who had— the Ancient term is complicated; the oldest version is _rhois altigo somata,_ which later on people thought meant something like ‘the river of the body,’ and they took it metaphysically, but really it means someone who meets certain physiological benchmarks on the road to ascension.”

Young stared at him. “ _Ascension?_ ”

“Yes.” Jackson’s mouth had tightened again.

“But that’s— I thought you had to _die_ to ascend. Or—“ Young became painfully aware that he was sitting across the table from the physical proof that you didn’t have to die to ascend, or at the very least that you could still come back once you had. “That it was— you know— all ‘finding inner peace and going off to be glowing balls of light in other dimensions.’ Not so much a practical thing.”

“No.” Jackson grimaced as he tried, without much success, to brush the shredded bits of Styrofoam off his hands. “It’s very practical. Or it was for the Ancients. It was physiological. They engineered themselves to be capable of converting their own matter to energy and retaining— whatever it is, I guess, that you have to retain to still be you. More or less. There are biological limitations to the process. Some people are closer to overcoming those limitations than others.”

 _Some people._ What he’d left unspoken hung heavily in the air over the table, souring the all-but-untouched coffee in Young’s cup.

Eventually Young cleared his throat. “So Rush—“

Jackson gave a minute shake of his head. “He can’t,” he said. “Even he doesn’t meet those physiological benchmarks. He’s the closest. But not enough of the Ancient heritage survived in us.”

“So then why—“

Abruptly, Jackson leaned in. “ _They engineered themselves to be capable of it_ ,” he said in a fierce whisper. “They _engineered_ themselves. You think none of their research survived? We know it did. Anubis found it, and maybe he only got halfway to ascension, but all that means as far as this project’s concerned is that he did the experiments _for_ us.”

“ _Experiments?”_ Young said in a rush of horror.

“ _Yes_.” Jackson removed his glasses and scrubbed at his eyes with one hand. When he blinked at Young, he seemed suddenly exhausted and myopic, somehow older and at the same time younger than he usually looked. “ _That_ is the point we’re at now. _That_ is David’s project. And the Lucian Alliance’s project, too, this fucking— race to the same miserable, maybe unjustifiable, morally ambiguous finish line, and Jack _hates_ it, but the Ori are out there, and the Lucian Alliance isn’t even _out there_ ; I mean, they’re out there, but they’re also _in here,_ and if Jack had to shoot someone to stop Earth from being destroyed—“

“Yeah,” Young said. “I get it.” But he wasn’t thinking about that, about Jack O’Neill’s moral crisis and the fucking Lucian mole. “What would happen to him?”

“To—?” Jackson squinted.

“To _Rush.”_

“Oh.”

 _Oh._ Suddenly Young was angry, angry even at Jackson, who claimed to be here on Rush’s behalf, but who maybe was more interested in moral principles than he was in the particular set of skinny shoulders onto which Young had, earlier that morning, pulled a camouflage jacket; more interested in politics and cosmic endeavors than the resentful way Rush banged pans around in the kitchen and huffed out his disdain of Young’s taste in wine. Young was slow; he was basic; he was stupid, so he could only deal with one very small piece of the world at a time, and right now he was dealing with _Rush_ , who was an asshole, not a moral principle. He said, louder, “What would happen to Rush?”

Jackson hunched his shoulders forwards. “I don’t think anyone knows, to be honest. Everything we _do_ know is— it’s in the folders. All the research, all the transcripts of the meetings— everything.”

“Right. Of course it is.” Young looked at the battered folders. “And it’s fucking classified, isn’t it? So I can’t tell him anything about it.”

“He doesn’t have the clearance,” Jackson said unhappily. “But do you really think that— I mean, even if you told him—“

“What?”

Jackson shook his head. “Well, you know Nick.”

“Yes,” Young said. He didn’t like that Jackson called Rush _Nick._

“What I mean is, it’s not even a question of shooting someone to stop Earth from being destroyed; it’s not even a question of shooting himself— although you do have to wonder if he’d shoot himself just to spite anyone who told him not to do it, or even suggested that he might want to possibly, maybe, _ever_ consider another solution. It’s the chevrons. It’s the ciphers. He wants to unlock them. He wants to be the one who goes. He’s perfect for the project, perfect. All he cares about is— I don’t know, pushing forwards. It’s why he likes David so much.”

“ _I_ like David,” Young said. The words caught in his throat. He hadn’t really thought about David, all through the conversation. David, bruised and sleeping on a cot in detention with the scars of Lucian Alliance knife-marks on his chest. David, who, he thought, sometimes seemed more inscrutable than Rush or Jackson, like there was a separate part of him, walled-off, where he stored everything that made him alone. David, who wanted so much to save Earth, to conquer into the unknown, to _win_. David, who was everything Jackson said he was, but in a way that Young had always wanted to be close to.

“I know you do,” Jackson said. There was a nervous hint of gentleness to his voice. “It’s just—“

“I know,” Young said— snapped, really, and then said, helplessly, “I _know_.”

There was a short silence.

Jackson stared at the table. “It should be me,” he said abruptly, at last. “If it’s anyone. If they do it to anyone, it should be me.”

Young laughed incredulously. “They’re not going to do it to _you_.”

“No?” Jackson fixed him with a defiant look, lifting his chin. “Why not?”

“You don’t even have the goddamn Ancient genes. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“That’s not why, though.” Jackson was gripping the edge of the table again, his fingers white-knuckled, as though he was trying to stop himself from doing something violent. “Tell me why. Say it.”

“Because you’re _Daniel Jackson_ ,” Young said unwillingly. The words came out short; he didn’t like being told what to say. “Everyone knows you; everyone likes you. You said it yourself: you’re the safest person in the whole goddamn program.”

“Yes,” Jackson said. He closed his eyes. “Yes. I’m very good at making friends, and twenty years ago I happened to translate some hieroglyphics. And that makes my life worth more than his. I can’t stand it. I can’t _stand_ it. You understand?”

“You did _ascend_ ,” Young pointed out. “More then once.”

“It’s not like I remember anything! No great cosmic wisdom, no messages from the beyond, no—“ Jackson pushed himself back from the table, but only by a few inches, out of what seemed like frustration. Then he sighed. “You know, I say that, but I don’t think it’s true. It’s _supposed_ to be true. It’s what the Ancients say, that they take everything. But how could they? They couldn’t. That’s not how it works. Memory’s not in the brain. Not all of it. It’s in the body. I hear something, sometimes—“ He removed his glasses and scrubbed at his face with one hand. “A piece of music, a sound, a word— and it’s like my body just… knows how it’s supposed to respond. I look at star maps and there are certain constellations that scare me. Or— Hoag’s Object, this sort of… galaxy, I guess. 600 million light years away. I don’t know what’s there, but I see it, and I just want to start _running_.” He looked down. “So why didn’t it stop me from finding the Ori? That’s what everyone wants to know. And I don’t have an answer. The body feels things, I guess. It doesn’t know. So all of this is nothing; it does _nothing;_ it’s— I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.”

“Because I’m here,” Young said. He was familiar with the situation. “Because you’re upset.”

“Yes. I should go.” Jackson stood, looking weary. He indicated the stack of file folders. “And you should read those. At the very least, you’ll know what you’re getting yourself into.”

“Great,” Young said, his mouth twisting. “Very optimistic. Thanks.”

Jackson hesitated. “I _will_ try to get you in to see David,” he said. “I wasn’t just saying that so you would…”

“I know,” Young said. His chest was tight. “I appreciate it.”

Jackson nodded. He picked up his ravaged cup of coffee and left.

Young stared down at the table again, at the specks of sugar. He stirred them with one finger, forming a galaxy swirl, then raised his own coffee to his lips. The coffee was lukewarm, but he drank it anyway. He was trying to avoid looking at the folders. He had a kind of dread of what was inside them. If he never opened them, he wouldn’t have to know. But not knowing, he thought, would not protect him. And more importantly, it wouldn’t protect Rush.

He imagined, just for a moment, packing Rush into his pickup and taking off for the border. From there they could go— well, who the hell knew. Just think: Rush on a beach in Oaxaca, drinking piña coladas. But it would be no kind of life. And what would he tell Rush, anyway? Jackson was right: the more Rush heard, the more he would want to do it. Not because it would save the Earth; Rush seemed not to give a damn about the Earth or anyone on it. He would do it because he was obsessed with the ciphers. With solving a goddamn puzzle.

Before he could talk himself out of it, Young slid the first folder across the table and flipped it open.

It contained typewritten transcripts from a series of meetings by something called Committee #6, which seemed to start out consisting of Landry, O’Neill, Telford, Lam, and Jackson. Wray had been added at some later stage. Young skimmed the transcripts briefly; they seemed to start out mostly concerned with the threat of the Ori.

> _O’NEILL: The point is that defeating these guys is not going to be like taking down the System Lords. And I never thought I’d be talking about taking down the System Lords like it was a walk in the park._
> 
> _LANDRY: It’s imperative that we take the initiative and explore all possible options, even those we might hope we’ll never find ourselves having to turn to._
> 
> _JACKSON: I object to keeping those options secret. The nature of the ethical concerns—_
> 
> _LANDRY: That’s why we’ve brought Dr. Lam on board._
> 
> _LAM: I’m also less than comfortable with these meetings._
> 
> _TELFORD: Well, maybe we should throw the whole thing wide open, then. What do you think, Jackson? Tell everyone exactly how the Ori found about this galaxy in the first place._
> 
> _O’NEILL: Exactly the kind of helpful feedback we were hoping for. How about I tell you where you can—_
> 
> _JACKSON: I don’t need you to defend me, Jack._
> 
> _TELFORD: What I’m trying to demonstrate is that you’re incapable of taking an objective stance on the issue. You feel responsible for the threat. You_ are _responsible. You brought the Ori to this galaxy. You ought to have been excluded from this committee on the grounds that any action we find it necessary to take could be interpreted as your fault, and likely will._
> 
> _O’NEILL: All right, that’s enough._
> 
> _TELFORD: All I’m asking for is objective consideration of an option that—_
> 
> _JACKSON: You don’t even know it’s a weapon! You have no idea what the nine-chevron address leads to._
> 
> _TELFORD: The Ancients thought it could rewrite fate. Whatever that is, it sounds to me like power. I don’t give a damn if they thought it was a weapon or not; it’s something that’s worth exploring._
> 
> _JACKSON: It’s not that I disagree; it’s that the cost of exploration is simply too high in this case._
> 
> _TELFORD: So now this is about cost-benefit analysis? Come on._
> 
> _JACKSON: You can’t seriously expect anyone sitting at this table to be objective about using_ Anubis’s _research. Anubis’s technology._
> 
> _TELFORD: It’s the Ancients’ research. All he did was collect it._
> 
> _JACKSON: You don’t even know how this device works!_
> 
> _TELFORD: We know enough._
> 
> _JACKSON: What, enough to use John Sheppard as your personal guinea pig? Carolyn, tell him that this is—_
> 
> _TELFORD: It wouldn’t be Sheppard. I’ve found a better candidate._

Young turned the page over. He stared at its blank white back. _Candidate,_ he thought. It occurred to him that he was going to have to be drunk to read the transcripts all the way through. 

He skipped ahead, not particularly interested in reading pages of Jackson and Telford politely tearing out each other’s throats. 

> _LAM: This third gene, which we’re calling UAT for the time being— that’s Unknown Ancient Trait— was present both in our extant samples of the Ancient genome and in Anubis’s clone. Exposure of cells containing this gene to active Ancient technology suggests that it does result in some form of excitation, and the fact that Anubis saw fit to engineer its presence is suggestive of a role in ascension. Given time, it’s possible that we would be able to engineer it as Anubis did, but I’m not comfortable moving forwards with—_
> 
> _TELFORD: We don’t need to engineer it._
> 
> _JACKSON: Rush doesn’t want to join the program._
> 
> _TELFORD: You didn’t give him the hard sell._
> 
> _JACKSON: Is that right? Tell me, David. What is the ‘hard sell’?_
> 
> _LAM: If I can continue._
> 
> _JACKSON: Yes. Carolyn. Excuse me. I’m sorry._
> 
> _LAM: The presence of these three genes alone is not sufficient for ascension. Ancient gene regulation was significantly different from our own, and it seems that the genes were expressed differently in their cells. It’s also possible they were capable of achieving conscious control of protein synthesis, or triggering a change in post-translational modification. Our own work with gene modulation is simply not at the level where we’d be capable of fine-tuning protein biosynthesis to achieve the amount and balance of these proteins that seems to be required, and which the genes as expressed in our sole human sample do not produce. It’s possible that working through Anubis’s database will provide us with the information we need to do this._
> 
> _TELFORD: But we have the technology he used, in the new lab that SG-3 found._
> 
> _LAM: Yes. A team is currently attempting to synthesize the compounds required to utilize the machinery there._
> 
> _LANDRY: It’s imperative that the discovery of that lab remains confined to SG-3 and this room. Carolyn’s team doesn’t know what they’re working on, and I’d like to keep it that way. We cannot allow the Lucian Alliance access to this technology, or to that database._

Good luck with that, Young thought. He hadn’t known about the lab, but he’d bet the Lucian Alliance did. And God knew what else they’d found out about, things that the SGC didn’t know, maybe— things that were, inconceivable as it seemed to him right at that moment, worse.

He scanned ahead again, barely seeing the next pages, until he ran into another mention of Rush.

> _JACKSON: He joined because you revealed classified information to him! Which, by the way, I find it completely objectionable as a tactic. You manipulated him._
> 
> _LANDRY: I don’t see much utility in having this conversation for the fourth time._
> 
> _TELFORD: How do you know he didn’t manipulate_ me _? We both got what we wanted._
> 
> _JACKSON: His wife had just died; he was in no fit state to make this kind of decision._
> 
> _O’NEILL: It’s better that way. No family._
> 
> _JACKSON: Oh, you are…_
> 
> _O’NEILL: Daniel. It’s better that way._
> 
> _TELFORD: It’s not like we could wait, in any case. We’re living under a goddamn siege; it’ll be a miracle if we don’t have to open a second front against the Lucian Alliance before the end of the year; we’re going to be_ annihilated _if we don’t do anything. Am I supposed to sit around and worry about hurting someone’s feelings?_
> 
> _JACKSON: You could pretend like you remember that people have them._
> 
> _TELFORD: Rush is tougher than you think. Plus— I find it highly suggestive that in the week he’s been in Colorado, he’s already managed to solve one of the ciphers._
> 
> _O’NEILL: What do you mean by that?_
> 
> _TELFORD: You think it’s a coincidence that the guy who found the code in the gate just_ happens _to be the guy with the closest thing we’ve got to an Ancient genome? He just_ happens _to be one of the world’s top cryptographers, someone whose entire job involves exactly the skills this problem requires?_
> 
> _JACKSON: No, I think it’s magic._
> 
> _TELFORD: Sheppard’s good at math, too, isn’t he?_
> 
> _O’NEILL: Is he? I knew there was something wrong with that man._
> 
> _TELFORD: His IQ’s on file. It’s something like 150._
> 
> _JACKSON: IQ doesn’t measure anything. It’s bullshit; it’s culturally biased._
> 
> _TELFORD: It measures how good you are at solving puzzles. Which seems pretty relevant in this case._
> 
> _JACKSON: Jack’s terrible at math—_
> 
> _O’NEILL: And proud of it._
> 
> _JACKSON: —and he was the first ATA-positive we ever discovered. So your theory is, much like IQ tests, quite frankly bullshit._
> 
> _TELFORD: Look, I’m just saying— Rush was literally made for this._
> 
> _JACKSON: No. No, he_ wasn’t _. You want to_ remake _him. You want to put him in that Goa’uld machine and reach down into his cells and change how they work; for God’s sake, you want to use an electric current to remodel the circuitry of his brain!_
> 
> _TELFORD: If that’s what it takes, then yes._
> 
> _JACKSON: You haven’t even told him the truth about why he’s here!_
> 
> _TELFORD: When the time is right, we’ll tell him. I’m not saying we shouldn’t give him a choice._
> 
> _JACKSON: Let us fry your brain, or it’s your fault when the galaxy gets destroyed? What the hell kind of a choice is that?_
> 
> _TELFORD: So you’d rather_ not _give him a choice. Interesting._
> 
> _JACKSON: That’s not what I’m saying._
> 
> _TELFORD: He gets as much of a choice as any of us gets. The choice, the_ chance, _to stand up and do something that_ matters, _and don’t pretend you wouldn’t do it in a second if you could, because we all know what you really mean when you say ‘it’s your fault when the galaxy gets destroyed’; we all know whose fault it really is—_
> 
> _O’NEILL: That’s enough._
> 
> _JACKSON: It is my fault. I know it is. We do things, and we don’t know in advance what kind of monsters we’re creating; it’s not like we can draw a map. We created the Lucian Alliance, too, you know. But what else were we supposed to do? Were we supposed to not destroy the System Lords? We do the best that we can; we don’t do the worst and cross our fingers._
> 
> _TELFORD: We do what’s necessary._
> 
> _JACKSON: So then we_ become _the Lucian Alliance. Scavengers eating the corpses of the men we’ve killed._
> 
> _TELFORD: Scavengers survive._
> 
> _JACKSON: I can’t believe you’re all sitting here listening to this.This is insane. Carolyn, you have to see that this is insane._
> 
> _TELFORD: Dr. Lam is a natural positive. ATA and ATS. With everything that’s at stake, if we asked her to do this—_
> 
> _JACKSON: She shouldn’t_ be _asked._
> 
> _TELFORD: She’s sitting right here. I think we should ask her._
> 
> _JACKSON: Stop it._
> 
> _TELFORD: Let’s ask her._
> 
> _LAM: Yes. I would. I’m sorry, Daniel. I would._
> 
> _TELFORD: Yes. She would. Because she knows that_ we are at war _, and she knows that if we don’t do this, we are_ fucked— _not just us; the whole galaxy. The Jaffa— fucked. The Tok’ra— fucked. Hell, even the Lucian Alliance. Fucked, fucked, fucked. And_ she _knows, and_ I _know, and everyone sitting at this table knows, everyone except, apparently,_ you, _that it’s all well and good to spend your life dreaming about civilization, like some ancient philosopher trying to figure out if he’s a goddamn butterfly or a man, but when it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter if you’re an insect or a person. The only_ real _question is whether you’re going to get crushed under someone’s boot. And—_
> 
> _JACKSON: Then what the fuck are we even here for?_
> 
> _TELFORD: —I refuse to be crushed._
> 
> _JACKSON: I mean, I really want to know. From your oh-so-enlightened perspective, what’s the point, in that case? Why the fuck are any of us here?_
> 
> _O’NEILL: Gentlemen._

Young had been forcing himself to keep reading since Jackson had said _remodel the circuitry of his brain._ He stopped now, feeling sick, and closed the folder. But the next folder was just as bad. It began with a diagram of Anubis’s laboratory, and a breakdown of the machines in it operated: the gel that leeched in through the skin and altered gene expression; the tank and the electric wires. He thought that if he couldn’t make it through that folder, he probably ought to resign from the project, maybe even from the program.

He understood what David was saying.

He agreed with him. He did.

In theory, Young agreed with him.

He was still trying to summon up the wherewithal to turn to the next document in the folder when his phone buzzed, granting him a blessed moment of relief. When he checked it, he saw that he had a text form the SGC’s emergency alert system: _REPORT TO: Level 27 Briefing E. To confirm receipt of this message, please press one.  To repeat this message, please press two. Should you be unable to comply with this message within a twenty-five minute window, please press three to connect with dispatch._

So. That probably wasn’t good.

He sighed and let his head drop into his hands for a second, wondering when he would stop expecting any of it to be good.

* * *

When Young got to the briefing room, Landry was talking to a civilian in a complicated wheelchair— some weirdly elegant woman Young had never met. They looked up as Young entered. Landry’s eyes went to Young’s stack of folders.

“I see you’ve been talking to Dr. Jackson,” he said.

“Yes,” Jackson said from behind Young’s shoulder, entering the room slightly out of breath. “He has. Is there a problem with that? He _is_ the acting head of Icarus.”

“There’s no problem,” Landry said, in a way that wasn’t entirely convincing.

“So maybe we can just stick to whatever it is that’s happened.”

Landry frowned, but seemed prepared to say more, but some sense of urgency must have decided against it. “They’ve missed their check-in,” he said. “Not just Sheppard’s team. The _Odyssey_ too.”

Young said, dry-mouthed, “Are we sending a MALP?”

“We’ll be patching the feed through any minute now,” Landry said, nodding at the monitor on the wall.

“Even if they broke the DHD, the _Odyssey_ should be reachable by subspace,” Jackson said, his brow creasing.

“I know,” Landry said. “It’s something else. Dr. Perry—“ he nodded at the woman in the wheelchair— “has been offering some ideas as to what that might be, since her research involves Ancient control crystals.”

“So when you say _something else_ , you mean a glitch,” Jackson said. “You mean a glitch; you don’t mean—“

Landry looked abruptly weary. He rubbed a hand over his face. He wasn’t wearing his coat; he’d stripped it off and was in his shirtsleeves. “If this isn’t a glitch,” he said, “then the magnitude of what we’re facing— the level of infiltration by the Lucian Alliance that this would imply—“

“Sheppard _and_ Rush,” Jackson said. His voice had risen, taken on an accusatory note. “You sent them together.”

“The Lucian Alliance has no foothold in Pegasus,” Landry said sharply.

Jackson regarded him with hostility. “And that’s the only reason?”

“We could guarantee Rush’s safety with Sheppard.”

“Well, apparently not!”

Young recognized the tone of the conversation from the transcripts he’d been reading— the sense of animals trapped in a den, snapping without real aim or motive at one another. He cleared his throat. “Maybe we should—“ he started to say.

But he was interrupted by the monitor fizzing to life.

Its screen showed the rippling blue expanse of the gate’s puddle, its surface warping in increasingly less water-like patterns as the MALP rolled forwards. There was an instant of cut-out as the robot went through, then—

Young frowned, and tilted his head, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. There was water, for sure— the MALP’s camera was bleary with it, and he thought for a second that it must be pouring down rain on the planet, until a sloppy wave of greenish water hit, almost overturning the MALP entirely. It was half underwater. A beach, Young thought; the gate was on a beach, and it was twilight; that was why he was finding it hard to make out landmarks. Once he had his bearings, he could parse the dark blue sky, with its chickenfeed spill of constellations, from the sand and the sea and the white of the cliffs. So what was—

“What the hell is that?” Landry said, voicing Young’s own question.

The MALP moved towards what Young had assumed at first was part of the local plant life— a glowing, bluish-white, surreally beautiful sort of shrub, a little more than half the height of a human and raising a fragile array of tendril-like branches. It was studded with little hints of color, jutting outgrowths of blue and gold and red, but somehow he still failed to make the connection until Jackson said slowly, “Where’s the DHD?”

“I think,” Dr. Perry said uncertainly. “— I think that _is_ the DHD.”

Then Young could see it, though he didn’t want to. He felt a sort of sickening lurch, because he had been thinking— it had reminded him—

During the Lucian attack, when they’d hit that wall of smoke going up the stairway, Rush had stopped for a second, just holding still and spreading his hand out in the dark air. With his blazer on, he’d looked like a man who was missing pieces: no arms or legs, only his white face under the shield of the mask, and his hands, which seemed disattached from his body, and the skeletal line where the blazer didn’t cover the front of his shirt. He himself had not known what to make of it, Young thought; he had stared at the light bleeding from his fingers and slowly closed them into a fist, as though he wasn’t sure that they’d obey his commands.

The light had been the same color as the DHD.

“Sir!” The camera on the MALP went wobbly as someone dragged the whole machine to a different location. When it refocused, it was facing a dark-haired airman with a harried expression. Her uniform looked to be soaked to the knee. “Sir, this is Lt. James. Do you read me?”

“We read you, Lieutenant,” Landry said. “Where’s Colonel Sheppard?”

“Colonel Sheppard is _gone._ Him and Rush both.”

“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

“I mean _gone_ ; I mean—“ She made a panicky gesture. “They touched the DHD, and something happened. There was this light— all our gear went dead— and they just _disappeared_.”

“Tell them it was an EM pulse,” a man’s voice said.

James glanced off camera. “The tech guy says it was an EM pulse.”

The man said, sounding resigned, “I’m not the _tech guy._ ”

In the briefing room, Dr. Perry said, “An EM pulse of sufficient strength could have knocked out the _Odyssey_ ’s communications array, if it was in orbit.”

“Pretty sure an EM pulse’s never caused anybody to _disappear_ ,” Jackson said.

Landry said darkly, “The Ancients sure as hell have.”

“Sheppard and Rush,” Jackson said, in a very different tone from the one he’d used before when he’d said it. “Do we think that’s a coincidence?”

He and Landry exchanged a glance.

“Sir,” James said from the monitor screen, “the gate is located in a beachfront position, and we’ve got a very high tide coming in. The tech guy— _Brody_ says we shouldn’t gate out, because we don’t know what Rush did to the DHD, or if him and Sheppard might be somehow… _inside_ it?”

“Just give me that,” the man’s voice said.

The camera swiveled awkwardly to face a nebbishy-looking civilian with a hangdog expression and a mop of curly hair. “If Sheppard and Rush have been dematerialized,” he said, “there’s a possibility that the DHD might be storing their patterns in its matrix. Even if they’ve just been, you know, _sent somewhere_ , it’s probably not the greatest idea to go messing around with the thing that sent them— you know. Wherever.”

“Agreed,” Jackson said.

“And it’s kind of hard to know anything about what might have happened to them, or even to, like, make an educated guess when every computer we brought with us is fried, and I’m not an expert on DHDs _or_ Ancient control crystals. I’m kind of just an engineer.”

“A tech guy,” James said, off-camera.

Young leaned over to Jackson. “Why… ?” he asked in a whisper, gesturing to the screen.

Jackson looked like he had a headache. “Because we needed an engineer, and he’s been on Atlantis. There was no possibility of Lucian contact. Which— if _we’re_ going to send a team—“

“We’re sending a team,” Young said automatically.

“That’s not your call, Colonel,” Landry said sharply. “And if we _do_ send a team—“

“Who do we send,” Jackson said. “Who can we guarantee— I mean _guarantee—_ is free of Lucian influence?”

Young said, “Well— me.”

“You’re on light duty,” Landry said, in a voice that dismissed the idea as ludicrous. “You’re not cleared. Medically.”

Jackson adjusted his glasses and looked down at the desk. “When mission parameters fall outside those explicitly delineated in SGC regulations,” he said almost conversationally, as though he weren’t reciting regulations, “the determination of _light duty_ shall be at the discretion of the ranking officer overseeing the mission or project in question unless directly countermanded by a member of the SGC medical staff.”

“And I’m the ranking officer.”

“It’s an Icarus mission. He’s the acting head of Icarus.”

Landry shot Jackson an exasperated look. “I’ll consider it,” he said. “And I mean _consider_ it. The two of you might as well go suit up in the meanwhile; I want Dr. Brody to walk Dr. Perry through what happened.”

“It’s, uh. It’s actually just _Mr._ Brody,” the hangdog engineer said.

Landry waved an impatient hand. “We can sit around and exchange niceties later. Start talking.”

Jackson caught Young’s eye and, together, they rose and left.

Out in the hall, Jackson leaned against the wall, crossed his arms, and studied Young with a faintly clinical air. “You think you can manage it?”

“I think there’s no other option,” Young said grimly.

Behind his glasses, Jackson’s blue eyes were very steady. “If you end up out of commission, they’ll have to take you off Icarus.”

“No one’s taking me off Icarus.”

Jackson exhaled slowly. “You read the files.”

“I read enough,” Young said shortly. “I’m going to that planet. I’m not letting anyone go without me.”

“Because he’s your friend, because you’re a stubborn asshole, or because you don’t trust anyone?” Jackson tilted his head. “Including me?”

“He’s not my friend. And I trust you. I trust _Mitchell_.” Young paused. “But—“

Jackson said, “But not all the way.”

“I don’t know,” Young said. “I don’t know; how can you—“ He gestured helplessly. “I used to _know_ ; I used to be _so sure_. You think they train us not to care about people? They train us to put our goddamn lives in each other’s hands. You know how much you have to trust somebody to go into a fucking firefight together? I would’ve died for any of the men I’ve served with, and if I’d thought for a second that wasn’t true, even a _second,_ I would’ve had no business even showing up.”

“I know,” Jackson said. His expression hadn’t changed. It was inscrutable; it seemed old in a way that made Young feel adolescent, even though he knew that he and Jackson were about the same age.

“And now—“ Young said. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, or Mitchell, or— hell, _David._ It’s the fact that I have to think about it. I have to think about it, just for a half-second; I have to give myself reasons. I have to remind myself _why_. I didn’t use to have to do that.”

Jackson shook his head. He looked at the floor. He didn’t say anything for a long while. When he finally spoke, his voice was low. “That’s how I know you’ve read the files,” he said.

* * *

Thirty minutes later, Young stepped through the stargate and off the edge of a continent.

Or that was what it felt like. He sank immediately in fast-running water that was almost up to his hips. The cold of it was a shock; he had to push forward, unseeing, through the twilit currents, trying to reach the higher ground where he could see the remaining members of Sheppard’s team gathered.

Jackson and Mitchell came through behind him, toting either end of a gear box. Mitchell made an undignified sound, sort of a yelp, when he hit the water; Young turned and raised an eyebrow at him.

“What?” Mitchell said defensively. “I think my balls just shrank.”

“Well, they were too damn big for your own good to begin with,” Young said.

“Was that a compliment? I think it was a compliment.”

“It definitely wasn’t.”

There was a thin, effortful quality to their banter, but it was enough to take Young’s mind off the mission— or let him pretend that it _was_ just a mission, like any other trip through the gate.

He hadn’t been sure that he’d ever go through the gate again.

Under the guise of getting a read on the terrain, he tilted his head back and breathed in the wet alien air, with its traces of salt and rock and something smoke-like that smelled the way that a meteor looked. He could see the whole spread of stars over the ocean and the colorless face of the enormous moon, with its smaller and bluer sister, half the size of Earth’s own and oddly marbled. It was beautiful; beautiful, he thought.

“Man,” Mitchell said, as they reached the lip of the water and found their boots hitting solid sand. “Those waves must’ve been coming in almost over Rush’s head. Why the hell did they pick this planet? Or did it not start out like this?”

“It didn’t,” Lt. James said, coming forward. “Sir. The water’s risen about four feet in the last hour, and it’s been getting faster. Col. Sheppard heard from the _Odyssey_ before we lost contact that there might be a high tide coming in. Something about the moons. They were going to keep us updated, but— well—“ she shrugged.

“Have you heard from them?” Young asked.

“No, sir.”

“Their array should be back up by now.” He raised his radio. “ _Odyssey_ , this is Colonel Young. Do you read me?”

There was static.

He waited. “ _Odyssey?_ ”

Jackson and the engineer, Brody, were wading out into what looked like some pretty rocky surf, examining the tips of the tree-like branches that had once formed part of the DHD. Under the flat light of the moons it was eerier, somehow, that structure— the only thing that looked alive on this cold, dead, rock-and-water world.

“I vote we set up the transmitter,” Mitchell said. “I’m from Kansas; we get real uncomfortable when we don’t know what the weather’s gonna be doing.”

“I don’t think tides are _weather_ ,” Young said.

“Well,” Mitchell said, “you know, I’m from Kansas. We also don’t do _tides_.”

He and Young got the gear box open so that James and her team could start assembling the components: tripod base, column, power supply, signal booster, receiver. The team had the transmitter up and powered in a matter of minutes.

Young still felt his inactivity for that span of minutes, watching them; he was conscious of himself as a useless component. He’d taken half a Percocet in the locker room while he was changing, not wanting to float out but needing to function; maybe if he’d taken a whole one, he would’ve been able to pretend that he could do the things an airman needed to do on a mission.

He cast a glance at Jackson and Brody, who were incongruously bent over a laptop computer while standing in roiling seawater over their waists. In typical nerd fashion, neither of them seemed to notice the water— or, particularly, the moon hanging over their heads. There was something a little bit unsettling about that moon, with its pockmarked craters. Maybe that was a human instinct, the need for everything to be just the right size, which was to say _Earth_ size; anything else was just unnerving. It didn’t fit into your mental map of the world. You didn’t know what to expect from it.

“We’re on,” Mitchell said, and Young yanked his gaze back.

He held out his hand for the handset and tried hailing. “ _Odyssey_ , this is Colonel Young. You there? I sure as hell hope so.”

Static crackled out of the receiver. Then: “This is Colonel Nasir on board the _Odyssey_ ,” a faint voice said, overlaid with hissing. “ —tus report?”

“Equipment’s fried,” Young said. “Two members of the alpha team are missing. Listen, we need an update on what you see happening with this tide situation. We’ve got water coming up over the gate.”

“Calcula—“ Nasir said, and cut out. “—pid increase; can you move— high— d or re—“

Young glanced at the sheer wall of the white cliffs. “That’s a negative,” he said. “Moving to higher ground is not an option.”

Static.

Nasir said, “—commend you con— mediate beam-out, Colonel; we can—“

“What kind of time frame are we looking at?” Young said, gripping the handset. His gaze went to Jackson and Brody again. The water was above their waists now, and crashing past them to scrape the edge of its foam almost to where Young was standing. He would have gotten his team out of there, if it had been an ordinary mission. But even though he didn’t know what the hell Jackson and Brody were doing, they seemed to be doing _something_ , and he hadn’t come this far across the galaxy for them not to do their damnedest to get Rush back.

He’d been trying not to think of it in those terms.

He’d been trying not to think of Rush at all.

If Rush was just a pattern stored in a DHD matrix, then he wasn’t conscious. He was just— sleeping. More or less. There was no need to worry about him.

 _“–_ timate a water lev—“ Nasir said. “— feet in the next— twenty— in the—“

“You’re cutting out,” Young said. “Can you repeat that?”

He was still looking in Jackson and Brody’s direction, which was the only reason he saw the wave coming.

“Oh, shit,” he breathed, and shoved the handset at James.

Then he was running, vaguely conscious of Mitchell behind him, shouting something that Young couldn’t make out. By the time he hit the edge of the water, the crest of the wave had plunged through the stargate, breaking over the DHD and swallowing it. Jackson and Brody were down— somewhere— somewhere— He couldn’t see them. He swept his gaze across the white churn of the water. They were gone.

“Young!” Mitchell yelled. That much Young could hear clearly. Mitchell was stripping his jacket off in short frantic gestures. “I’m going under!”

Young nodded tensely.

Mitchell dove into the surf.

Before Young could think too much about it, he had done the same— or not diving, exactly, which was an arch too far for his mostly-frozen body, but plunging into the water on the hard side of a sucked-in breath.

It was cold and soundless under the surface, and he couldn’t think. He opened his eyes and saw the DHD, blurred and bone-like and gleaming where nothing ought to be gleaming. It was beautiful, and it resembled a skeletal hand. Once he had seen that, he wasn’t able to unsee it. He thought of sirens, mermaids, the deepwater fish that grew their own lanterns, delicate things that hunted prey and wrecked ships.

He didn’t see Jackson or Brody. He didn’t see anything alive. Only the rocky detritus that had collected on the seabed.

Eventually he had to surface, his lungs burning. Other parts of his body were burning. He wouldn’t, he thought, be able to do that again. Probably he shouldn’t have done it in the first place, but he’d taken the Percocet for a reason.

Further towards the shore, where the crash of the waves turned easier and shallow, Mitchell surfaced, heaving Brody onto the sand. Brody was conscious, coughing in a way that sounded painful. He was trying to talk between coughs, but not managing it, until he scraped out in a tight voice, “Rush’s computer! Still— plugged in—“

“I’m going back for Jackson,” Mitchell said. His voice had taken on a brittle, glassy quality that Young recognized. Jackson was Mitchell’s teammate. That meant something to Mitchell. If Mitchell couldn’t find Jackson in the water, Young would have a hell of struggle getting Mitchell off the beach and through the gate.

“Go,” Young said. He waded over to Brody, who was still trying to get the water out of his lungs. “The computer’s a loss,” he said. “It’s fried; it’s underwater.”

Brody shook his head, panting. “Hard drive. Might still— Told us. Destroy all the data.”

 _“Shit_.” For a second, Young considered the odds. A half-drowned, lifeless planet in the middle of nowhere, one the SGC had presumably picked because it was someplace the Lucian Alliance would never think of going. But there were seven guys on Sheppard’s team. There was the _Odyssey_ ’s crew, who might not know the mission, but knew they’d been sent to the middle of nowhere for some reason, and knew the middle of nowhere’s SGC designation, if not its gate address. News traveled. News traveled _enough_.

“Shit,” he said again, quieter. “Okay. Get up; get up, go tell James to order the _Odyssey_ to beam us out on my mark.”

Brody nodded and hauled himself to his feet, heading up the beach in an unsteady stumble.

Young turned, forced a hard breath in, and aimed himself at the water. A high wave hit him just as he managed a half-dive, shocking most of the air out him and leaving him with an impression of violence. But he still forced his way under, kicking against the pain in his right hip, and headed for the DHD’s pearlescent outline. As he got closer, he could make out, in the faint unsteady glow it was emitting, the drifting computer bound to it by a fistful of thin black threads.

He didn’t have time to worry about how the computer might be connected, or whether he’d damage it by getting ahold of it and just yanking it as hard he could. So that was what he did: grabbed it, tucked it under one arm, and headed for the surface. There was a brief moment of tension, where he felt the DHD pulling against him, like he a fish snagged on a particularly painless hook, but then the cable pulled free and he was free, too, shoving his way up towards the moonlight.

He broke the line of the water dizzy and gasping for air, too disoriented to tell where the shore was, where he should head. Pain was slicing through his lower back, and for one panicked moment he thought that he couldn’t feel his legs. But it was just the cold turning him numb; his legs were still working. He could use them, and that was good, and once he knew that they were working, the fear seemed like a shot of amphetamine. It made the grinding pain of propelling himself towards shore into a relief, once he had registered the calls and shouts from the team and gotten oriented.

He still had to grit his teeth as he heaved himself, all hands and knees like something half-drowned, onto the shoreline. As soon as he wasn’t moving, his immediate urge was to curl in on himself like a wounded animal. But James was there right away, and one of her team, gripping his arms and helping him to stand.

“Sir,” James said— loudly, so he could hear her over the surf. “Mitchell’s got Jackson. The _Odyssey_ is waiting on your mark.”

Young nodded, exhausted, and shook away his streaming hair. “Get me to the transmitter,” he said.

God, it hurt to move. God— God— He’d really fucked up, he thought half-hysterically, as he realized that he wasn’t even walking, that James and her guy were more than half-carrying him. But he had the computer, or James had it; she was handing it off to Brody; and Jackson was hacking up seawater with his arm over Mitchell’s shoulder, looking half-conscious, but he was alive, and Brody was alive, and Rush was alive, Young thought, he _had_ to be, _somewhere_ , maybe just sleeping; God, let him be sleeping, held in the DHD’s skeletal hand; and then James was handing him the transmitter handset, and though it took him three tries to press the button—

“ _Odyssey_ , get us the hell out of here,” he said.


	20. Epnia Xoret, Neden Menet

“Sheppard.”

Sheppard frowns and snuffles and pushes his face into what he thinks is going to be a pillow, but turns out to be stone.

“Sheppard.”

He’d been having a nice dream. There hadn’t been anything special about it, really. But a lot of the time these days he dreams dreams that aren’t maybe his dreams exactly. More like the dreams that thermostats and transporters and water filtration systems dream. Do thermostats and transporters and water filtration systems dream? Maybe they don’t dream till he’s dreaming. His dreams aren’t his own. But neither are they thermostat and transporter and water filtration system dreams. They’re something he dreams with the thermostats and transporters and water filtration systems. Not human dreams and not just the dreams of circuitry humming and beeping and doing self-checks that can’t really be called self-checks because it doesn’t really have a self. Someone else’s dreams.

Sometimes it’s peaceful being a water filtration system. But after a while, it gets boring. And it kind of makes him feel queasy. He always wakes up expecting to slosh around inside his skin. So it’s nice to dream about something else.

“Sheppard, wake up.”

But this person, whoever he is, is being really annoying and insistent, even though he’s not McKay— which is funny, because nine times out of ten if someone’s being really annoying and insistent, it’s going to be McKay, especially if he’s trying to wake Sheppard up.

So Sheppard blinks at the guy, whoever he is, and rolls over with a grimace. He has a headache. There are neat little white and blue tiles under his hands. A pretty color of blue, dark and glazed and gemlike. Blue, he thinks vaguely; wherever he is smells like blue, too, in a way that Atlantis usually doesn’t. Atlantis smells like light through church windows. Old metal and leaded colorless glass.

But why would he not be on Atlantis?

And he’s not— _not_ on Atlantis; there’s a feeling he can’t quite—

“As you’ve evidently regained control of your nervous system, perhaps you’d consider reassuring me that your brain hasn’t liquefied inside your head,” the annoying man who’d woken him up says. He has a really strong Scottish accent, for some reason. “Not that I expect I would notice much difference.”

“Yeah,” Sheppard says, and pushes himself up to a seated position, squinting. “No brain liquification. Just me.”

“Liquefaction,” the man says.

“What?”

“The correct term is _liquefaction_. Not _liquification,_ which, I very much regret to inform you, is not a word. _”_

Rush. The man is Rush. Supercilious, short-fused, long-haired, dark eyes with crooked glasses, nervous, jerky, giving Sheppard a spooky feeling, staring at the DHD, the glyphs lighting up under his hand—

“Shit,” Sheppard says. “It wasn’t a dream.”

“I don’t know to what you’re referring.”

Sheppard looks past Rush, trying to get a sense of where they’re at.

It’s some kind of courtyard— eight walls, high ones, the whole thing shaped sort of like a diamond, except with the sharp points sanded off. Four doors where the points should have been, carved thick with little ornamental details and set under big looping arches. It kind of reminds him of some place in Spain or Morocco, or maybe Afghanistan, before he and his buddies got there. There’s even a fountain in the middle, weirdly geometric, sputtering clean water down into a basin made of cornflower-colored clay.

“I tried the doors,” Rush said. “They won’t open.”

“No,” Sheppard says resignedly. “Of course they won’t.”

At least it’s warm. He tilts his head back. There’s sunlight. Well, it feels like sunlight, although he’s about fifty-fifty on whether any of this stuff is real.

“So,” he says eventually, “you wanna bet?”

Rush frowns. “Bet?” he echoes, sounding bewildered.

“Yeah, on how long it’s going to be before we have to start this test. Trial. Whatever. I wonder if we’ll get a warning before some dude comes at us with a broadsword. A warning would be _polite_ ,” Sheppard says, raising his voice to shout the last word at the courtyard walls. “I’m just saying!”

“Am I to take it that this sort of thing happens to you with some frequency?” Rush doesn’t really wait for an answer; he pushes himself to his feet from where he’d been crouching by Sheppard and starts pacing jerkily back and forth.

“Sort of,” Sheppard says. He picks himself up off the tiles and stands, stretching and making a face as his back cracks.

He’s not carrying his weapons. He’d known as soon as he woke up. He’s the sort of guy who always knows where his gun is. He just doesn’t worry about it too much on Atlantis, these days, because of the whole—

He thinks he’d know, is all. If he needed a gun. He thinks it would feel different. Not the steady _chirp-chirp-chirp_ of all the complacent systems. That’s kind of what he feels now. Just an awareness that things are working around him. The air isn’t dead like it is on Earth.

“I think we should try opening one of the doors,” he says.

Rush stares at him. “Are you mentally deficient?” he asks. “I mean, I’m asking in all seriousness if you have a disability of some sort, or are suffering the effects of a concussion. I told you; I’ve already tried the doors.”

Sheppard shrugs. “Yeah, but I think we should try them again. Together.”

“My God, you _are_ deficient.” Rush turns away, shaking his head in disgust.

“You know, that’s not a very nice thing to say.” Sheppard shakes his head and inspects one of the doors at close range. It’s really pretty, actually— made out some kind of reddish wood, and covered in dense blocks of calligraphy that must be some stylized version of Ancient. He can understand a letter here and there.

“Yes, well, I’m not a very nice person,” Rush says with some asperity. “This isn’t a very nice _situation._ ”

Without warning, he turns around and delivers a savage kick to the fountain.

Sheppard frowns at him. “Now why would you go and do that? I like that fountain. I think it’s peaceful. It’s got good feng shui.”

“Oh, of course _you_ like it.” Rush spits. He seems like he’s getting a little worked-up. His hands are clenching and unclenching into and away from tight fists. “You probably like _all_ of this, being locked in this cryptic fucking garden, doors without locks that still don’t open, water that comes from nowhere, a sun that can’t be a sun; for all I know you can’t feel or bloody _hear_ that— whatever it is, I can’t _shut it off;_ it’s just—“

“Hey,” Sheppard says. He crosses the courtyard to where Rush has pressed a closed fist against his forehead. “Just cool it, okay? I can feel it. You’re not crazy.”

“I know I’m not crazy!” Rush snaps. But he must be a little reassured, at least, because he lowers his hand to his side, breathing harshly. “If anyone here is crazy, it’s _you_.”

“Yeah, I know. Deficient.” Sheppard lets his mouth quirk upwards. He studies Rush. “Does it really bother you that much? I’ve always kind of liked it.”

“Always?”

“This is what it feels like on Atlantis.” Saying it out loud makes Sheppard feel melancholy, like at the same time he’s home and very far away from home. He doesn’t even feel that way on Earth now. Earth is a foreign country. There’s a quote about that, isn’t there? All the time he spends on Earth, he feels like an insect lodged in amber. Slowly calcifying. He doesn’t know if _calcifying_ is the right word.

Sometimes he thinks Atlantis is the amber, though. If he’s the insect. The tree sap that the amber started out as. It spins itself out when he pulls away from it, always attached to him with one tendril. It’s sticky, and once he touched it, he couldn’t untouch it. He’s always aware of it wanting him back.

Is that bad? He doesn’t mean it in a bad way. Maybe the insects in the amber didn’t mind what was happening to them. Maybe they died happy deaths. Or maybe it wasn’t death at all. After all, they started out as mosquitoes and got to be gemstones. When all was said and done. In the end.

“This is what it feels like,” he says softly. He reaches out with a fingertip and touches one of the white walls. “It didn’t use to feel like that; it’s sort of like we’ve gotten more in tune. Gradually. But the more in tune I am with Atlantis, the more I’m out of tune with everything else. It just feels wrong, like when you get out of a plane, and your ear is kind of—“

He stops, because Rush has gone completely still.

“What?” Sheppard asks.

“Why did you choose that phrase?” Rush says intently, fixing his dark eyes on Sheppard.

“What phrase?”

“ _In tune._ You said _more in tune_ , why did you say that? ”

“Oh.” Sheppard shrugs. “I don’t know. That’s what it feels like. Doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Rush whispers. “Yes.”

He closes his eyes, pushing his hair back from his face with a restless hand.

“Is it really that bad?” Sheppard asks, aware that he’s asking Rush to answer a question he himself has no answer for, and whose answer probably _has_ to come from himself. “To be—“

He doesn’t know.

Rush turns away and doesn’t give him an answer.

Sheppard exhales resignation. Maybe he’s glad Rush didn’t answer. “Well,” he says, “it’s Ancient tech. That feeling. That’s what it is. So I think if we both try to open the door, it’ll probably do _something._ Please note I’m not saying it’s going to open the door.”

“Fine,” Rush says curtly. “Which door?”

“I don’t think it matters.”

They choose the nearest door, which has a really large _latha_ carved around its handle— one of the letters of the Ancient alphabet.

“Ask it to open,” Sheppard says. “Think about opening.”

“That’s what I did the last time,” Rush says sourly, “and look where we ended up.”

But he presses his palm to the door, and Sheppard mirrors him, touching the warm wood and reaching out in his head to the current of _otherness_ that haunts him when he’s on Atlantis, the ageless hum of objects being objects in a way that never gets easier for him to understand, but that keeps on being there anyways. Like a shadow in a Peter Pan story— something with its own ideas and its own way of moving through the world that just happens to be attached to you at the ankles, or maybe all over, like a second skin.

Yes. A shadow. Sometimes overlapping with his body, and sometimes much bigger than he is. It’s there and it’s not, it’s real and it’s not real; it haunts him because it’s ghostly. But it’s him, too. It is. It’s part of him.

On Earth he’s learned that you can be lonely for part of your own body.

 _But I’m here now_ , he thinks. _So let me in, or out, or— wherever. I can’t stay here forever._

There is a muted sense of disagreement, a strain of regret or longing. But abruptly something gives way with a electric _crack_ , and—

“ _Kal ven_ ,” a woman’s voice says.

Sheppard opens his eyes and turns.

A woman is standing in the center of the courtyard. She’s not really a woman. He can pretty much call that kind of thing by now. She’s a good imitation of a woman; he’ll give her that. Standard Ancient stuff: olive skin, white robes, a spill of straight black hair ornamented with little jewels like diamonds. She’s barefoot, and the pale soles of her feet don’t quite meet the patterned blue-and-white glaze of the tiles.

“Hi there,” Sheppard says. “Nice to meet you.”

She smiles at him in that beatific Ancient way, like the painted face of a saint in a low-grade cathedral who’s really enjoying having her breasts cut off or being roasted to death. Which is pretty much consistent with the reasons an Ancient would have for smiling. _You’re dead_ , Sheppard thinks. _Your whole civilization is dead. Even if you’re really here and not a hologram, you’re still just a ghost._

The woman— hologram— ghost— whatever— flickers slightly. “Welcome,” it says. “Are you ready to begin?”

Beside Sheppard, Rush reaches out and passes a hand through the woman’s body, parting it as though there were nothing there. Which, in a manner of speaking, there isn’t. “She’s not real,” Rush says.

“Well,” Sheppard says. He shrugs. “I mean, she is _real.”_

“Is any of this real?” Rush looks around a little wildly at the walls, the sun, the fountain.

“I figure ‘real’ is kind of a spectrum,” Sheppard says.

“Yes, but— where _are_ we? Materially? Physically? I have a _body_ ; it can’t just— _stop existing!_ ”

“You know where you are,” the woman-who-is-not-a-woman says. She seems to fix her eyes on Rush. The tiny jewels in her hair glisten, exactly as though they’ve been touched by the sun-that-is-not-a-sun. “You know why you have come here. You know what lies beyond these walls.”

And, as though she has spoken the knowledge into being, an idea blossoms inside Sheppard’s head. He can picture the city beyond these walls, the city from which this courtyard is only a gem-like corner of isolation, the city rising arch upon arch, tiered like the most delicate cake for an unearthly wedding. And in a way it _was_ a wedding, a marriage and a consummation, the way that the spires of the future mingled with the stone of the past. Narrow avenues where white marble, or something like marble, was carved into knotted spirals and arabesques— avenues curled in amongst overhanging bridges of glass and trinium. Floating ships whispered over tiled streets in the older _demmas_ of the city, whose spiderweb of alleys he knows— knew?— knows like the back of his hand. Acolytes of a thousand cults kept up a hum as they chanted their way to ascension. If you climbed high enough, transitioning to the clean lines and colored windows that had been the inheritance of Atlantis— the star-prints and geometric panels that replaced calligraphy on polished jasper, porphyry, or wood— and kept climbing up into the towers that seemed grown rather than crafted, so impossible was their weight and balance, the heart-stopping beauty of their angles and their curves— then you might see the fields beyond, where silver-green grass stirred to the horizon, split by smooth stripes where generations of farmers had harvested lilies and hyacinth—

He knows what it smelled like, is the worst part. The warm stone in the summer. The sweet oils that the cultists daubed on their temple walls. Walking slowly through the rows of lilies-that-were-not-lilies, trailing his fingertips against the freckled, crooked bells; the faint, drowsy spice of their fragrance. The churned-up dark soil underfoot.

This is the first time and not the first time he has dreamed of such a city. Such a planet. Or—

He has dreamed of being a machine that dreamed about this city. When it used his body to dream.

Rush makes a sudden, jerky movement towards the door— one that Sheppard thinks would be disastrous.

“No,” he says, catching Rush by the arm. He keeps his eyes on the hologram. “It’s not there.”

Rush makes a wordless, choked sound. “It _is_. It’s there; it’s—“

“Dead,” Sheppard cuts him off. “It’s been dead for millions of years. They left that galaxy to the Ori. They left the whole _universe_ to the Ori, and they didn’t come back.”

“It’s not dead,” Rush whispers, agonized. “It’s not. I can feel it. What’s left.”

Sheppard shuts his eyes.

A water filtration system doesn’t die.

But everything else does. Everything around it.

Atlantis remembers what it was like to be dead-but-not-dead.

Atlantis doesn’t like it when Sheppard leaves.

He thinks it would have nightmares, if it could have nightmares.

“Let’s just stay focused on what we came here for,” he says, and shoves Rush back into the center of the courtyard, towards the hologram.

The dead woman regards them with the same placid, benevolent remoteness. She clasps her hands in front of her and asks once more, “Are you ready to begin?”

“Yes,” Sheppard says, before Rush can say something stupid. “Yes, we’re ready.”

The hologram flickers, like it’s loading a program. The woman smiles her empty smile. “ _Kal ven_ ,” she says. “You are in a garden to which there are four doors. One of the doors is the door through which you have come here, and you cannot exit this life as you came. One door is truthful about its exit, and its exit is truthful. One door will deceive you. One door fluctuates like the river of the body, and therefore you cannot trust yourself to it. If you wish to learn how you may leave this garden, then you must consult the doors.”

She bows, like this has all been some kind of great performance, and then— after some kind of lag in her programming— abruptly disappears.

Sheppard groans and drops his head, raking his hand through his hair. “ _Great_. Fucking _logic_ puzzles. Why couldn’t we just have to shoot something?”

But Rush is frowning, already thinking it over.“How does a door communicate? The traditional version of this riddle requires the involvement of some form of spoken language.”

Sheppard says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Counterfactuals,” Rush says absentmindedly.

He turns in a slow circle, eyeing the doors. Sheppard follows his gaze. One doors has vanished, melting away into white wall as though it had never existed. So _that’s_ comforting. But at least it narrows their choices.

Rush approaches the door nearest to him, which seems to be distinguished by carvings of an enormous letter _ot_ and _et,_ although the second one might be _pay—_ it’s hard to tell for sure, given how long and dramatic the lines are. He touches it for a moment, tracing the swooping line of a carving with one tentative fingertip.

“It may be ludicrous of me to ask this question,” he says after a long hesitation, “but: are you the truthful door?”

There’s a _shiver_ of some kind, almost like a cloaked ship moving through the courtyard— something Sheppard can’t see, but knows is there.

Rush steps back, looking startled. “Ah,” he says. “Are you the deceitful door?”

Again, the air seems to ripple. Rush tilts his head as though listening to a sound that Sheppard can’t hear.

“Are you— _hearing_ something?” Sheppard asks cautiously. “Is it _answering_ you?”

Rush ignores him. He hums a note that, to Sheppard, just sounds like a note. Sheppard thinks he should get credit for even knowing it’s a note. The History of Art and Music classes at his fancy prep school were pretty much wasted on his teenaged self.

“That note,” Rush says, apparently talking to the _door_. “Is that how you would respond if I asked you whether the door behind me was the fluctuating door?”

He waits. Sheppard still doesn’t hear anything: only the trickle of water in the fountain.

He wonders whether the fountain is real. Presumably it is, since Rush could kick it. But he meant what he said. There’s a spectrum of real.

That disturbs him as much as it does Rush, probably. But he’s gotten good at not showing any doubts. Fake it till you make it, right? Except that, on a bad day, he wonders if faking the reality of a thing _is_ what makes it real.

Fake it and make it.

Fumble through life, sowing accidental monsters. 

Rush says thoughtfully, “And _is_ the door behind me the fluctuating door?”

A brief pause.

“If I asked the door to my left to answer the question ‘Are you the deceitful door?’, what would its response be?”

Another pause.

“Is the door to my left the fluctuating door?”

“Rush,” Sheppard says, a little nettled by now, and spooked by the turn of his own thoughts, “care to tell me what the hell is going on?”

Rush turns to his left. “This is the door we need to go through.”

“Yeah? How exactly do you know that?”

Rush gives him a disdainful and distinctly professorial look. God, Sheppard just bets he’s a professor, or was, and Sheppard’s never gotten along with professors. They always think he’s insolent, or arrogant, or they just don’t like the look of him. And he doesn’t trust them, really, because he can tell he’s smarter than them— which isn’t the way it’s supposed to work, so then what else isn’t going to work the way it’s supposed to? _Problems with authority_ , they call that in the service, but Sheppard thinks it just makes sense.

“It’s a puzzle,” Rush says. “One asks the required questions, which generate a sequence of answers revealing the identities of the agents in question. An alternative solution utilizes an XNOR condition—“

“No,” Sheppard says. “I mean— questions have answers. You were talking to _doors_. How did they answer you?”

As he speaks, he realizes that he’s the wrong one to be asking this question. He, more than anyone, knows how a person can talk to doors. But he’s never been the one on the outside of the conversation. He didn’t realize how unsettling it could be.

Rush does pretty much what he would do, but in a Rush fashion, which is to say that he gives Sheppard another _look_ , and doesn’t deign to offer any more information. “They answered,” he says. “You’ll have to trust me. Unless you’d prefer to stay here.”

Sheppard would prefer _not_ to stay here. It’s a nice enough imaginary courtyard, on a nice enough imaginary day, but he doesn’t really _believe_ in it, is the thing. And he’s not sure how that would work out in the long run.

“All right,” he says. “Okay.”

He follows Rush to the door. The biggest letters carved into it are _my_ and _taph_. He doesn’t really even like Ancient, he thinks. As a language. He’s always associated it with emergencies and with death. After all, none of their language survived in the ways that matter. He’s never read an Ancient poem. He’s never found Ancient graffiti. It’s all just prophecies and technical inscriptions.

Rush pushes the door open.

Sheppard thinks— he wishes that their poetry had survived.

* * *

Opening the door was a bad idea.

It’s hot.

Very hot.

Hot, as in: Sheppard staggers immediately under the glare of some kind of light source, choking for breath and almost unable to move. His skin feels like it’s burned already; the insides of his eyelids are seared red.

He gasps, “I think you got the wrong door.”

Rush shakes his head in a jerky way, but he’s obviously just as out of commission. He tries to shrug his way out of his jacket and then shields his face with it; after a second he drops to his knees.

“No,” Sheppard says. He grabs Rush under the arms. “Come on; get up. Get up. There’s got to be a door of some kind, or else we can—“

Go back, he was going to say, but the door behind them has vanished. So they have to go forwards.

And they do, but the room only gets hotter. And it _is_ a room, Sheppard realizes, not just some kind of— crematorium for people who can’t solve logic puzzles. The walls are curved and lined with mirrors; that’s why it’s so goddamn hot. The rays of light just keep going and going. He can see the brief shadow of his black reflection, dragging Rush forwards. He’s soaked in sweat.

In the mirrors, his face looks like a ghost captured on camera. Something not quite human, something that’s been dead for a while.

“Come on,” he says, more to himself than Rush, maybe. “Come on. Come on. Come on.”

But there isn’t a door, is the thing. They reach the far side of the room and it’s nothing, just more mirrors. Sheppard pounds against them; gropes for some kind of crack or keyhole. He presses his hand flat against the reflection of his hand.

Rush collapses in a long slow slide to the floor. “It wasn’t wrong,” he says hollowly. “That was the answer to the riddle.”

Sheppard pounds his fist against the mirror again. He leans his forehead against it and tries _thinking_ at it, thinking about freedom and unlocking and even going back to the courtyard. He crouches down and grabs _Rush’s_ hand, and slaps Rush’s palm against the scorching-hot surface of the glass.

It doesn’t work.

The room keeps getting hotter and brighter.

Sheppard watches blisters form on the surface of his skin.

“That was the door,” Rush murmurs, his head lolling against the mirror. He’s mostly unconscious, which is probably a good thing, because what happens is: they die like that, cooked by a sun they can’t escape, in agony.

Sheppard thinks, before the end— right around the time he starts vomiting up the last water in his body— that this is what he thought it’d be like in Afghanistan, before he showed up, because it was the desert, and they even called it Baghdad 2: Electric Kabulaboo, but it turned out to be cold, and maybe he’s being punished for that, for the stupid nickname, for the shitty things he’d done in war and outside of it, but what is Rush being punished for, because Rush isn’t even a goddamn soldier, which he means he hasn’t had the same chances to be shitty, the same almost unthinkable remit, and Sheppard tries to shelter Rush with his own body, feeling the kind of gentleness and pity that maybe you only feel right before you’re dead.

And then he doesn’t feel anything, because he’s dead.

So he feels dead.

* * *

“Sheppard.”

Sheppard groans and tries to bury his face in the bathroom tiles he’s apparently used as a pillow. He’s got a _killer_ hangover, and he doesn’t think he’s in Atlantis, and it’s not exactly like he can miss the last train home, so something’s—

“Sheppard, wake up.”

Ah, shit.

He blinks up at Rush. “We’re alive,” he observes, somewhat redundantly.

“It would appear so.” Rush glances around ruefully, indicating the white walls of the courtyard, once more boxing in them in.

Sheppard rolls onto his back and stares at the blue sky.

The fountain is trickling placidly behind Rush. Something about the sound of it reminds Sheppard of the smiling hologram. He presses the flats of his palms against the blue-and-white tiles and remembers what dying felt like. After a while he crawls his way across the courtyard and dunks his head in the fountain basin, letting the cold current thud against the back of his head.

“That was also my first instinct,” Rush says. When Sheppard emerges from the fountain, he can see that Rush’s hair is, in fact, wet.

“So,” Sheppard says. “Wrong door?”

Rush frowns. “No.”

“Usually when you pick the right door, it means you don’t die.”

“Counterpoint,” Rush says. “When you pick the right door, it means you get another _chance_ not to die.”

Sheppard tips his head back against the rim on the fountain. “You think?”

“Another test.”

“That— doesn’t really seem fair, somehow.”

“No,” Rush says. He comes to sit beside Sheppard, and rakes the damp strands of his hair back. “Did the first part seem fair?”

“Well,” Sheppard says, and shrugs. “I mean, fair enough: if you want something, you’ve got to prove you deserve it. I guess I didn’t realize this whole cipher thing was going to require so much deserving.”

Rush is silent. He looks down at his hands. “If it were about deserving,” he says eventually, “it would be fair, wouldn’t it?”

It’s a pretty cryptic statement. Or— rhetorical question, whatever. Sheppard studies him for a while and then says, “Yeah.”

“I didn’t know about their technology when I got involved with the project,” Rush says. “I didn’t know about the genetic requirement.” He isn’t looking at Sheppard. “That’s what the program calls it. A _requirement._ But it’s just another kind of test. A way of parceling out people into who passes and who doesn’t.”

There’s a pause.

“That’s not what it’s about,” Sheppard says at length. But then he doesn’t know how to explain. So he just says, “I always did really well on tests. Confused the hell out of people; they couldn’t figure out if there was something wrong with me, or maybe something wrong with the tests. Cause I was never good at anything else. They even tried to figure out if I had some kind of learning disability or something. But really I just only cared about… I don’t know, flying airplanes and surfing. And pissing people off whenever I could.”

Rush gives him a disbelieving look that turns almost non-hostile. His mouth forms a kind of halfhearted, crooked hook. “Well,” he says, and then doesn’t say anything else.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Sheppard says. “And you might be better at pissing people off, but I’m _definitely_ better at surfing.”

Rush offers a thready, breathless laugh.

“So what do you say we go try not to die some more?” Sheppard picks himself up, wincing and feeling the shadow of blisters, and turns to offer his hand to Rush.

Rush touches him cautiously with light fingers, as though testing strange waters. “… I suppose we might as well,” he says.

* * *

They die again.

* * *

“Fuck,” Rush says heavily, scooping up a double handful of water and dousing his flushed face with it.

“Yeah,” Sheppard says, not moving from where he’s stretched out on his back against the tiles.

“I’m Scottish; I’m not physiologically engineered for that sort of environment.”

“Tell me about it. You’re lucky you get to die first.”

There’s a silence. Rush drinks some water out of the palm of his hand. Sheppard turns his head to watch him do it. Rush looks tired, but there’s a tightness around his mouth suggesting that, more than anything, he’s resigned. McKay’d be throwing a tantrum about now, or bouncing off the walls jibber-jabbering about solving the puzzle, but Rush— Rush was more upset about being stuck in an imaginary garden, or being maybe-crazy. Now that things’ve started hurting, he seems pretty down for it. Sheppard kind of gets that. At least you know where you stand when things are hurting. He’s known a lot of guys like Rush in the service— in a firefight, their heart rate didn’t even seem to spike, but put ’em on desk duty and they’d be up on charges in a month.

He always seems to end up on charges no matter _what_ he does. Or he did until Atlantis. It’s not so much like there was a part of him missing and more like there’s a part of him Atlantis eats up.

“The light source,” Rush says, staring at the blue sky with an absent expression. “Where is it located? Is it stationary?”

“I don’t know,” Sheppard says. “I’ve been a little distracted.”

“That, no doubt, is the intent.”

“Maybe this time you should focus on recon, and I’ll focus on getting us across the room.” Sheppard arches his eyebrows, asking for confirmation.

Rush makes an exasperated sound. “I’ve always suspected that Wittgenstein would have a great deal to say about your military’s abiding passion for extraordinarily stupid abbreviations.”

“Whatever. Remind me to keep you away from any pokers,” Sheppard says, hoisting himself to his feet.

* * *

“Do you really know who Wittgenstein is?” Rush asks in a scraped-out, barely-there voice, after they’ve died and been resurrected again.

“Kind of,” Sheppard says. This time he’s the one dunking his head in the fountain, while Rush lies facedown on the tiles, apparently too spent to even turn on his back. “Mostly just that he hated philosophy and drove people crazy. That’s a man I can respect.”

Rush laughs a cracked little laugh and covers his head with a folded arm. “I can’t fault you there.”

“Did you get a look at the light source?”

Then Rush does turn over, or, well, he kind of flops his way over like a mostly-dead starfish. “Yes. It appears to be located equidistant between the eastern and western walls, approximately 1/2r distance from the perimeter, and mirrors our advancement— that is, its forward progress is equivalent to our own.”

“Mirrors,” Sheppard says absently. He stares down at the surface of the water, his dark reflection broken by a thousand little droplets impacting it. “Maybe it’ll leave if we just manage to outlast it? There’s got to be some place in that damn room that’s dark enough for us to survive in.”

Rush slowly turns his head to stare at him, a frown creasing his brow. “ _What_ did you say?”

“Someplace dark,” Sheppard says. “So we could make it a little longer. Someplace the light can’t manage to get to.”

Rush keeps staring at him, but his eyes go slightly vacant. It’s a look that Sheppard’s familiar with from dealing with McKay and his mini-McKays. “Yes,” he says eventually. “Yes, that’s possible. In fact— but then the question becomes: what shape is the room?”

“Kinda think the question’s still how we get out of it,” Sheppard says.

Rush gives him a look of distaste. “Don’t offend me by acting less clever than you are,” he says.

* * *

This time they both do recon, Sheppard taking the three o’clock and Rush taking the nine o’clock side of the room.

All it means is that they die alone. And Rush still dies first, so Sheppard’s left crawling across the floor, wracked by cramps from dehydration and trying, out of an impulse born in the misfiring parts of his increasingly dysregulated brain, to get to where Rush is, because it turns out his last, panicked, dying thought is that he doesn’t want to die alone.

“Please,” he says raggedly, his hands slippery with his own sweat. “Please. Not alone.”

* * *

“It’s a Penrose unilluminable room,” Rush says as soon as Sheppard wakes up.

Sheppard lies against the blue-and-white tiles and looks at Rush. He’s really tired, he reflects. He’d like to go back to Atlantis, where he’s never alone, at least if you count intermingling the electromagnetic field of your brain with the electromagnetic fields of things-that-can’t-be-people as a way that someone can not be alone. He’s gotten pretty used to that. And, for what it’s worth, he thinks it counts. But right now he kind of wants to push his face into Rush’s shoulder and just breathe there for a while. Which he’s pretty sure would get him kneed in the balls.

That’s fine. Normally he’d knee someone in the balls for doing that to him, too— probably without even thinking about it. He’s never been a really tactile person.

He should get a dog, he thinks. Or whatever passes for a dog in Pegasus.

Rush is staring at him expectantly.

“Penrose unilluminable room,” Sheppard says. “Right.”

“The walls of the room curve forwards very subtly on either side. Behind each of the curves, there ought to be two small extrusions, just above and below the nine and three o’clock positions. If we advance until the light is exactly centered in the room, the spaces below nine and three o’clock should be dark. I suspect we may find a door, or doors, there. If not, perhaps you’re correct and the light source will disappear if we manage to shelter for long enough.”

“Penrose,” Sheppard says, half-attentive. “Like the tile guy?” He’s getting pretty tired of tiles.

“I rescind my observation about you being clever. Have you in fact been listening to anything I’ve said?” Rush shakes his head, looking disgusted with himself. “Christ; look at the effect you’re having; I sound exactly like Young.”

“I gotcha,” Sheppard says. “Three o’clock. Nine o’clock. Extrusions.”

“Yes, well.” Rush still looks irritated. He presses his lips together tightly and glares at Sheppard. After a long pause, he says, with visible reluctance, “Try not to die, I suppose.”

* * *

When Sheppard ducks behind the curve of the mirrored wall and steps into the newly-created shadows, his groping hands find the outline of a door.

“Rush!” he shouts. “There’s a door!”

Rush shouts back, “I’ve got one as well! Go through it!”

Sheppard hesitates, pinched for a second by a sense of dread. What if he and Rush end up in separate places?

“Rush!” he shouts again. “I think maybe we should go together!”

But there’s no answer. Rush is already gone. And Sheppard is starting to feel a little woozy. He thuds his head gently against the door.

“Oh, hell,” he says. But he doesn’t have a lot of options. So he opens the door onto an exquisite relief of blackness, and lets himself fall bodylessly through.

* * *

“What took you so long?” Rush says without looking up, when Sheppard staggers out of the darkness and into a pale, soft, pearl-colored light.

Rush is standing in the center of what looks like a large grotto, carved by natural or unnatural forces out of silvery-bluish stone. The air feels chilly and damp, and the walls have the slick-smooth and oddly swollen texture of rocks that the sea has slowly worn down— except for the particular wall Rush is staring at, which has a huge flat square cut into it, like a game board. White tiles, each one bearing a single Ancient letter, have been arranged to fit in the square in five columns and four rows:

NETEN  
ETNEM  
INOEX  
PARDE

“You left without me,” Sheppard says, mildly accusatory.

Rush ignores him. He reaches forward and pulls down the final _et_ tile, squinting at it. “Clearly we’re meant to rearrange the tiles to form some sort of message. But I’m not able to translate what’s already there. ‘No one has…’ No one has something. Is that right?”

Sheppard sighs and crosses the grotto to stand beside him. “ _Ne tenet nemino ex parde,”_ he says. “No one has… no one has each part? Or every part, maybe. On Atlantis it would say _exsto,_ not _ex,_ but that could be an abbreviation.”

“No one has every part,” Rush says pensively, turning the square white tile around and around in his hands. “I’m afraid my Ancient vocabulary is somewhat limited.”

“Well, no one has every part,” Sheppard says, but Rush doesn’t seem to get the joke, or he’s gone back to ignoring Sheppard in favor of the puzzle in front of him. Sheppard rolls his eyes and opts to secure the room out of habit, prowling around the grotto’s perimeter and missing his rifle. All he comes up in terms of recon is that there are no exits and he doesn’t know how the light is getting in.

“Do you hear water?” he asks after a while, frowning up at the low curve of the ceiling.

“Almost certainly a negative of some sort,” Rush says absently.

“You don’t hear that?”

“In the puzzle. Three _enu_ , three _esp_ ; there’s almost certainly some form of negation.”

“Or you’ve just got a couple third-person verbs with an _enu_ in them,” Sheppard says. “ _Renet. Menet. Donet. Ponet._ ”

Rush scowls at him. “Yes, all right. I take your point.”

Sheppard crouches down at the far side of the grotto and puts the palm of his hand against the smooth floor, which has the appearance of sanded marble. “Uh,” he says. “Rush—“

“Still, there must be an obvious means through which to establish a portion of the output. We’re not computers, and the number of possible permutations given a string of twenty separate characters is—“

“A little less than two-and-a-half quintillion,” Sheppard says, because he’s already done the calculation in his head. “If you’re just looking at raw permutations, and not taking rules about letter combinations into account.”

Rush turns and stares at him.

Sheppard shrugs.

“You’re in the _Air Force_ ,” Rush says disbelievingly. “You _shoot_ things.”

“Yeah,” Sheppard says. “I used to fly helicopters. And planes, sometimes. It was pretty fun.”

“Quite obviously you’re impaired by some sort of emotional damage.”

Sheppard _really_ isn’t ready to go there with Rush, and anyways, there’s something a little bit more urgent they need to be discussing. “What do you say we talk about my emotional damage later,” he says, “because here’s the thing: this place is filling up with water.”

Rush looks down, and lifts one of his boots up. The water that Sheppard had detected as a thin trickle seeping under the far wall has spread to a lapping puddle that splashes in a little in protest when Rush puts his foot back down.

“Fuck,” Rush says.

“Yeah,” Sheppard says.

Rush is still staring at the water. “I don’t—“ he says. “I don’t particularly care for water.”

“Well, maybe we should think about solving that puzzle, then.”

“Yes,” Rush says eventually. “Yes.”

But he doesn’t look up from the water. It’s like he’s paralyzed. So Sheppard takes the tile from his unresisting hand and walks up to the puzzle, tilting his head to consider it, thinking it through.

“ _Donet_ and _ponet_ are probably the most common,” he says. “ _Menet_ ’s a little less common, but still up there. I guess it could still be _tenet_. If no one’s got every part, what does everyone have?”

“Something wrong with them,” Rush says. “Something missing.”

“See, that doesn’t feel very Ancient to me.” Sheppard removes the tiles for _tenet_ and looks at what’s left. “ _Epnes_ ,” he says. “Everyone. _Epnes_ is the opposite of _nemino_ , but there’s no _esk. Epnia_ , maybe?”

Yes, he thinks. The Ancients wouldn’t say _everyone_. They’d say _everyone-and-thing._

He removes the tiles that spell out _epnia_.

The water is up over his ankles now, but he ignores it. He’s got pretty good tac boots on. It’s more distracting that the water smells like the sea, briny and wind-chopped and wide-open, in a way that even the ocean back on that cliffs-of-Dover planet hadn’t. It makes him feel like if he could just chip through the walls, maybe Atlantis would be out there. He knows it’s in another galaxy, too far away for him to ever travel except by wormhole, but that’s one of the ways the whole situation fucks with him: Atlantis can be impossibly far away, and yet he’s also part of Atlantis, in a weird way, so wherever he goes, there Atlantis is. The tree sap stretching over distances, holding onto his ankle, where it’s already working on metamorphosing him.

Fuck. Fuck, he misses Atlantis.

“ _Xene_ ,” he says. “Something about a foreigner? _Meno? Demo?_ Everything has _what?_ ”

“Could there be some sort of proverb?” Rush asks.

“Maybe.” Sheppard puts the stack of tiles down in the water and rubs his hands over his face. “Think,” he says to himself.

He can’t help but think that if he were on Atlantis, the answer would come as easy as breathing. He’d be able to reach down into the parts of himself that aren’t in his body and just sort of wordlessly put the question to them. Then he would feel like, actually, he had always known. And maybe he _would_ have always known. It’s a matter of who you’d be talking about when you said _he_ ’d always known it. It’s a matter of where you’d draw the outline around _him._

“Everything,” Rush says in a thin voice. He’s got a hand hooked over his shoulder, looking like he’s trying desperately not to pay attention to the water that’s steadily rising up over his legs. “Everything. What does everything have?”

“Honey,” Sheppard guesses. “ _Mened._ No, wait. That’s _meled_.”

“Of course it’s not fucking honey; why the fuck would it be _honey?_ ” Rush looks as though he’d like to throw something at Sheppard, but he settles for splashing his hand angrily against the surface of the water, which he can do without much effort, since by now it’s almost up to his waist. He’s short, of course; he’s going to die first in this room, too, which doesn’t seem quite fair to Sheppard.

But then, maybe Rush was right. None of it’s fair.

“Look,” Sheppard, trying to sound calm and convincing. “I’m trying.”

“Yes, well, perhaps you should stick to playing human calculator. How many permutations have we got left?”

Ten letters. “More than three million,” Sheppard says. “In theory. But I don’t think _mxdr_ is going to end up being part of the solution.”

“Oh, I can think of quite a few people I’d like to _mxdr_ ,” Rush says darkly.

“You know, you’re genuinely kind of scary when you say that,” Sheppard tells him.

“Sincerity is the terror of those who take shelter in irony.”

Sheppard barely manages to stop himself from rolling his eyes. “Come on.”

“What?” Rush looks offended.

"Spare me, Dr. Sarcasm. I bet you’ve never said anything sincere in your whole life.”

Rush’s mouth tightens and he looks away abruptly, his jaw working. “Yes, well, fuck you,” he says. “Why don’t you solve the fucking puzzle, if you’re so fucking insightful?”

“I solved half of it already!” Sheppard points at the stack of tiles now totally hidden by water. “Fuck _me?_ Why don’t you do your half? This is a _group project!_ ”

“I solved the last _two_ puzzles!” Rush says, or really kind of yells, slamming the flat of a hand down against the water that’s starting to lick at his shoulders.

“Not before I got killed a million fucking times!”

Rush makes a hissing sound of frustration. “Oh, spare me your bloody whining. So you died a little; that’s your _job!_ ”

Sheppard laughs in disbelief. “You know what? Screw you.”

He turns back to the puzzle, which is now about halfway covered with water, and starts trying to piece words together. The letter _det_ could be something, maybe an ablative ending. _Moned? Mored? Nemed?_ None of it seems to mean anything, is the problem. A verb could end in _det_ , but it’d have an _alif_ also, and it’d be in the past tense, and that doesn’t seem to make sense either.

“Sheppard,” Rush says in a panicky voice.

Sheppard ignores him.

“Sheppard!”

Sheppard sighs and turns around again. The water is up over Rush’s shoulders. The ends of Rush’s hair are trailing in it, and Rush is breathing in fast, shaky, nervous pants, obviously freaking out.

“There’s nothing I can do,” Sheppard says, a little apologetic, but also pissed-off. It’s not like Rush is actually going to die, which makes it hard for Sheppard to feel too sorry for him. “I don’t know the answer.”

“You have to do _something_. You _have to_.” Rush sounds agonized. “Please. I can't die like this.”

“ _There’s nothing I can do_ ,” Sheppard says again. He’s not _not_ disturbed by something in Rush’s eyes, a raw and unfocused darkness that spits fear and snarls to show animal teeth in its jaws. This, he thinks, is why Rush isn’t sincere. This is what he’s hiding, or what he’s trying to keep kenneled so it can’t do any harm. But instead of course it escapes in sharp pieces, one tooth at a time, and Sheppard’s spent enough time wrestling with his own relatively rat-sized darkness to know that the teeth never run out. “Rush—“ he starts to say, ready to try and talk Rush down a little, because both of them are going to wake up and be fine—

But that’s when Rush jumps him. Or, okay, Rush doesn’t so much jump him as shove him hard against the wall and try to use him as a flotation cushion, clawing Sheppard down into the water so he can climb up onto his shoulders, then fighting Sheppard as Sheppard chokes and lashes out in an effort to get air. Rush kicks him in the ribs and gets a fistful of his hair, giving Sheppard a brief and diamond-sharp moment of insight into the value of the uniform regulations, before trying to wrestle him under again. Sheppard’s bigger and stronger, obviously, but Rush is so goddamn determined, and just _merciless_. He is _not_ going down. Except both of them are going down, really, because the water’s still rising, which is why this whole thing is fucking stupid, a huge waste of their fucking time, a reckless, idiotic, and clumsy game of chicken fight where the chicken is fighting against itself as it drowns.

And they do drown. Sheppard doesn’t know who drowns first. They’re still fighting when the water fills up the room.

It’s fast after that, but not fast enough.

Fuck, Sheppard thinks resignedly as he watches light drift through the underwater currents, his lungs a solid ache of hysteria at the center of his body. Fuck.

* * *

Sheppard wakes up with Rush kneeling over him in the courtyard, so naturally the first thing he does is punch Rush in the face.

“What the fuck?” Rush spits, sent tumbling gracelessly backwards.

“What the fuck?” Sheppard says incredulously. “What the _fuck!_ You tried to _drown_ me!”

Rush looks shifty. “No. I tried to prolong my own access to the puzzle, in the hopes that I could—“

“You _asshole!_ ” Sheppard says, and tries to hit him again.

Rush ducks the incoming fist and kicks Sheppard’s feet out from under him, and they squirm around on the blue-and-white tiles flailing at each other for a while. Neither of them really lands a satisfying blow. Eventually Sheppard just grabs Rush by the collar of his oversized jacket and shoves him hard towards the wall.

“I thought we were in this together,” he says, aware that he sounds like a dumbass, or like a girl who’s just been broken up with.

Rush straightens unsteadily, holding a sleeve up to his bloody nose. “I’m not in this with anyone,” he says viciously. “ _Anyone.”_

“Yeah, thanks; you’ve made that pretty fucking obvious!” Sheppard petulantly turns his back on Rush, because, you know, that’ll show him.

There’s a long silence. They avoid looking at each other.

Sheppard says grudgingly, “At least we can solve the puzzle here, and we don’t have to keep dying in that fucking room.”

“I knew you were capable of joining me on the moral high ground,” Rush says, lofty and supercilious.

“Fuck you,” Sheppard says with a disgusted gesture. “Don’t talk me to unless you’re solving the puzzle.”

“Fine,” Rush says. “I won’t.”

“Fine,” Sheppard says. “Good.”

They sit for a while, presumably both thinking about the puzzle.

“Five columns of four letters strikes me as an oddly arbitrary choice,” Rush says. “Neither five nor four is a particularly significant number, insofar as I know.”

“ _Epnia_ has five letters,” Sheppard says. “So does _tenet._ And a lot of simple singular verbs.”

“So perhaps we’re looking for four five-letter words.”

Sheppard sighs and rubs a hand through his hair. “But if we have _epnia_ and _tenet_ , then that doesn’t leave a lot of options. _Neden_ ’s a word, but that leaves, like, _merox_ and _morex_ , neither of which makes any sense, or—“

“What does _neden_ mean?” Rush asks.

“Like—“ Sheppard gestures. “Doesn’t, or never. Everyone never has something?”

In his peripheral vision, he sees Rush pacing. Sheppard’s heart is still punching hard against the wall of his chest, not quite convinced that he’s not going to start drowning or fighting again at any minute. It’s a fair suspicion, given the way Sheppard’s luck tends to run. Although he doesn’t have a whole lot of experience with drowning, which is funny, given the whole floating city thing.

Floating, he thinks. The Ancients liked water. They liked it as a metaphor. They wrote about it a lot. _The floating diadem_ was one of the things they called Atlantis. _The crown that flows with the current and cannot be kept._ It can’t be kept because nothing can be kept.

Nothing.

“No one has every part,” Rush said, half to himself. “So what does everyone have?”

“Nothing,” Sheppard says.

“Admittedly _nulla_ is five letters, but we have no _latha._ ”

“No, I mean—“ Sheppard gets to his feet, now fisting his hair with both hands, like he’s holding onto the reins of an answer he hasn’t gotten a steady mount on yet. “It’s not _tenet._ People don’t _have_ things; that’s not how it works. _The river of the body_ , that’s how they talked about it; the enlightened man _isn’t_ anything, so he can’t _have_ anything, either. _Xoret_ ; it’s _xoret._ Everything flows.” And then abruptly he _does_ know the answer. “Everything flows and never remains. _Epnia xoret, neden menet._ ”

Rush stares at him. He’s wearing a strange expression.

“It’s a proverb,” Sheppard says, a little impatiently. “It’s the answer. _Epnia xoret, neden menet_. Everything changes. It never remains what it is, so it replaces itself. It never _remains._ ”

“I understand what it means,” Rush says, his voice clipped.

“So… ?” Sheppard is a little irked that Rush doesn’t seem pleased they’ve solved the puzzle. That _Sheppard’s_ solved the puzzle— on his own, pretty much. If Rush is going to be a craven murderer, he could at least be nice when he’s not murdering people.

But all Rush says is: “Yes, yes.” He gestures stiffly to the door. The loose sleeve of his jacket has a dark spot where the lip of it is still stained with his own blood. “Lead the way,” he says, without looking at Sheppard.

* * *

Arranging the letters as

EPNIA  
XORET  
NEDEN  
MENET

causes the stone of the grotto to grumble until it gradually hews out an exit: a narrow passageway that seems to head towards the source of the hazy light.

Sheppard is pretty suspicious of the idea that the passageway is actually going to take them anywhere with a real sun, and he heads into the passageway imagining all the fun new ways he and Rush are going to get fucked over this time, so he’s not all that surprised when the passageway doesn’t so much end as sort of gently transition into more passageway, now with smoother and straighter walls. Gradually, the dark gray stone overhead gives way to a starless and moonlight sky. The passageway makes a right-angled turn, then another, then presents an intersection.

“So,” Sheppard says wearily. “Now we’re in a maze, I guess.”

Rush is scrabbling in his pockets, looking a little bit rat-like. The transition between places or dimensions or mental constructs hasn’t done much about the streak of blood on his top lip, or the way his nose is swelling up.

“I haven’t got a pen,” he says distractedly. “Have you got one?”

Sheppard says, “I think I broke your nose.”

“Mm.” Rush is still digging, fretful. “Yes, quite likely.”

“You don’t seem that bothered.” Sheppard reaches into his upper left pocket and hands Rush a Sharpie.

“A due payment duly discharged.” Rush examines the Sharpie and uncaps it. “It’s been done before. Take your coat off.”

“What? No!” Sheppard crosses his arms.

“Well, roll up your sleeves then. We need a map, and I haven’t got any paper.”

“I’m not here to be your substitute paper!” Sheppard says. But he grudgingly rolls up his sleeve and holds out his arm so Rush can mark the start of a map on the back of his wrist. “So what do you figure— are we going to die of starvation, or is a monster going to come along and eat us?”

Rush caps the Sharpie and turns to consider their diverging options. “I suppose we’ll find out shortly.”

“I just figured you’d want to know, so you can plan in advance how to kill me.”

“Oh, please.” Rush’s mouth tightens. “Let’s not exaggerate what was, at most, a minor act of self-preservation.”

“Right. So you’re going to push me in front of the monster, then.” Sheppard pulls out a pencil flashlight and heads down the left passageway. The moonlight is nearly enough to see by, but he distrusts the shadows enough to want to augment it.

There’s something eerie about a night with no stars. Like the whole galaxy’s stopped existing, or the whole universe, maybe, and he and Rush are the only ones who’re left.

The only ones, Sheppard thinks. The thought seems to resonate more than it should in his body, through parts of him that aren’t really or aren’t always him. The echo gets thrown back to him as a whisper. The only ones. The only ones.

* * *

There isn’t a monster, as it turns out. It’s just that when they reach a dead end, the equivalent of a ding-dong-you’re-wrong gong gets hit, the sound of which keeps increasing until blood comes out of their ears and their lungs pop in their chests.

* * *

“Well,” Sheppard says, the first time they wake up back in the courtyard, “at least no more minor acts of self-preservation are on the menu.”

Rush throws him a frustrated look. “Leave it, won’t you?”

“Probably not.” Sheppard lies on his back and lifts his left arm up, looking at the map that half-covers it. “There’s got to be some kind of trick to this, right? By the way, I’m not taking off my shirt, no matter how nicely you ask me.”

“I never suggested _any such thing,_ ” Rush says, a little too sharply, which means he’s either starting to fall apart or he does kind of want Sheppard to take off his shirt.

Sheppard’s used to people wanting him to take his clothes off. Sometimes, yes, even people who’ve tried to murder him. That’s a little weird, maybe— but then, he himself is not exactly normal. He took what he could get for a while, because he was always in war zones. And then at some point he just always felt like he was in a war zone no matter what, like he carried the war zone wherever he went with him, or like the war zone he was living in was himself. So. And then Atlantis, and its never-aloneness. The whole thing of sex is that at some point you’re supposed to find someone you can be naked with. But now no one can ever really see every part of him. He’s okay with that, mostly. He hadn’t wanted them to before. So it’s not like he’s lost anything.

He looks at Rush. Rush’s nose is turning dark blue, and definitely bent.

“Perhaps you can simply perform your trademark magic trick of thinking very hard at objects until they do what you ask them,” Rush says snidely. And then he tosses his hair back and actually lifts his battered little nose in the air. Sheppard’s never seen someone do it. He didn’t think people _did_ do it. He thought it was something that only happened in books.

“Perhaps I can,” he says, and stretches his arms luxuriously out above his his head, filing away the almost-imperceptible glance Rush darts at him.

* * *

They die four more times in pretty quick succession.

Rush takes it harder each time— not the dying part, but the neverending loop between maze and courtyard.

The fourth time is when he finally snaps. They wake back up to the implacable fucking babble of the fountain, which by now Sheppard would really like to bulldoze into the fucking ground with a layer of salt over it. Rush curls up into a tight little knot of a person before wrenching himself to his feet with an incomprehensible Scottish swearword and hurling his whole body at one of the walls, pounding his fists against it.

“Easy there,” Sheppard says, a little alarmed.

“I’d rather fucking die!” Rush spits out, his voice ragged. His whole body’s tense and vibrating like a piece of metal when you whack it with a hammer, and he’s managed to scrape the back of his hands raw. “I’d rather fucking die than have to keep doing this over and _fucking_ over. It’s all a maze. All of it. It’s all just separate rooms of the same long fucking for-their-amusement fucking maze.”

“Maybe that’s part of the test,” Sheppard says. He could approach Rush, but he thinks: better not. He keeps his distance.

Rush closes his eyes and doubles over, folding his arms on top of his head. “How long,” he asks after a pause, “ do you think we’ve been in here?”

Sheppard doesn’t answer. After a while, he rummages in one of the pockets of his jacket. He holds up a bar of chocolate. “I think you need a snack,” he says.

* * *

On their next go they manage to stay alive for a while, to the point that Sheppard has to ditch his jacket and roll his t-shirt sleeve up above his shoulder. At first he enjoys watching Rush flush when he has to notate a new part of the maze on Sheppard’s bicep. But after a while, as the map extends over his collarbone— he shrugs the shirt off one shoulder, probably stretching it out forever, assuming that its location on the spectrum of reality is one where he has to worry about shit like stretching it out— even that gets tired, or Sheppard does.

“I do get it, you know,” he says, when they’ve stopped for a morose little moonlight picnic of lukewarm canteen water and SGC-brand protein bars. “I can’t die in here. I’ve got a city to get back to.”

“You talk about it like it’s your wife,” Rush says.

“That’s very, uh.” Sheppard searches for the word. “ _Heteronormative_ of you.”

Rush coughs up water. “ _Heteronormative?_ ”

“Well, I was gonna say _straight_ , but then it kind of sounded like something that only someone who…” He trails off and shrugs.

Rush gives him a _look_. “And you, of course, are not someone who…?”

Sheppard opts for an enigmatic smile. He pops a piece of protein bar in his mouth.

Rush, when he realizes Sheppard isn’t going to answer his question, just rolls his eyes.

“You, though,” Sheppard says. He gestures with his canteen at the gold band on Rush’s left hand. “You’ve got a wife.”

Rush glances down at the ring. “Very heteronormative of you,” he says.

“No. Just— it wouldn’t be legal in Colorado.”

“Ah.”

Sheppard says, “For whatever’s that worth.”

There’s a long pause.

Rush takes a sip of water.

Sheppard’s about to change the subject when Rush says flatly, “I had a wife.”

Sheppard glances at him and doesn’t say anything.

Rush closes his hand into a fist. He’s still staring down at the thin line of gold on his finger. Then abruptly he stands up, rips the ring viciously off, and hurls it over the high gray walls of the maze: a tiny spinning meteor-speck against the empty-except-for-the-moon stretch of the sky. It disappears, but Sheppard doesn’t see it falling. There’s no sound to indicate where it lands, so maybe it doesn’t land. Maybe it spins forever. Maybe it’s still out there. A meteor that grazes the atmosphere and keeps going on its path.

Rush is facing away from Sheppard, so Sheppard can’t see his expression.

“I have _nothing,_ ” Rush says in a tightly controlled voice, holding his hands knotted at his sides. “ _Nothing_ to get back to. _Nothing_ that is holding me back.”

He stalks forward without a further glance at Sheppard, and they die not long after that.

* * *

“Everyone has something they want to get back to,” Sheppard says on their next go-round, as they’re picking their way between the aircraft-hangar-colored walls under the hyper-critical eye of the moon. “I mean, I’m a kind of hypocrite for saying that, I guess, since I bailed on Earth for Atlantis, but—

“I don’t,” Rush says tersely.

“So— what? We just die in here, and that’s fine with you?”

“I don’t think I’m likely to have an opinion on the matter, as I’ll be dead.”

“Yeah, but there’s gotta be someone who would miss you. I mean, _me_ , when I went to Atlantis, most of my guys were dead, but that’s—“ For some weird reason it’s kind of seizing up his chest, thinking about Mitch and Dex and Holland, the way it hasn’t done in a long time. He clears his throat. “It’s— you know— occupational hazard. And you’re kind of an asshole, but still, I bet there’s _someone._ ”

Rush abruptly wheels on Sheppard. “Oh, and I suppose your _city_ would miss you if you died now, would it? Your _city_ cares whether you live or die?”

Sheppard’s taken aback. He considers it for a second. “Yeah,” he says honestly. “I think it would. It does. Not— you know— the same way as a person, but—“ He moves his hand in a halting, useless gesture.

Rush makes a cutting sound of condescension. “You don’t really believe that.”

Sheppard looks at him. Rush is breathing hard, body tilted slightly forward in a way that’s aggressive, like he trying to pick a fight, like he wants Sheppard to hit him again. The bruise from where Sheppard hit him the first time has spread into a moody crescent along the orbital bone, so it looks like the reverse of a black eye.

“I don’t know why you’re here,” Sheppard says. “If you don’t believe that. And you know what? I think that _they_ won’t know why you’re here, either. The Ancients. Whoever and whatever you think they are.”

“Fuck you,” Rush spits at him. “You think I can’t do this? You think they’re going to stop me? _Nothing_ is going to stop me.”

Sheppard shakes his head, grinning the kind of grin that means he doesn’t really think something’s funny. “I think I’m glad that at least when I die here, something out there’s going to notice.”

They don’t talk for more than hour after that. And then they die.

* * *

“There’s got to be some kind of trick,” Sheppard says tiredly, picking himself up off the tiled floor of the courtyard. “It doesn’t make _sense_ otherwise; it’s— _mmph!_ “

He staggers back into the wall as Rush slams into him, seizes two fistfuls of his shirt, and kisses him.

It figures that being kissed by Rush is a lot like getting punched in the mouth repeatedly. Still, it’s pretty fun; no one’s touched Sheppard in a while, because he used to mostly go for casual hookups, and it’s hard to do those anywhere but Earth. Everything on Atlantis is so _serious_ ; you have sex, and then suddenly the other person’s MIA, or _you’re_ MIA, or the whole city’s about to be nuked from orbit, and no one really knows how they’re supposed to feel. Plus the whole gay thing, and rank, and Rush is warm and small and sharp-featured and practically shaking with pent-up nerves, and when he sticks a hand up under Sheppard’s shirt, Sheppard sucks in a breath and just goes with it, because it feels really, really good.

And he goes with it when Rush starts peeling his shirt off, because at that point Rush is mouthing hotly at his neck. Sheppard thinks vaguely that it’s just his style to finally get lucky in some kind of trans-spatial interdimensional Ancient courtyard on a break from dying in various horrible ways, but, you know, he’s not saying no, even when his shirt ends up in the fountain because Rush threw it over his shoulder without pausing to look.

But that’s about when all the warm-good-kissing-touching-yes-thumbs-up-all-on-board-with-this stops.

Sheppard blinks dazedly at the blue sky.

Rush is still very much _there,_ pressed up against him, hands against his naked shoulders, but he’s— not doing anything.

“Uh,” Sheppard says.

“No,” Rush says, and shoves Sheppard’s face to the side without looking up. “Don’t talk right now. I’m thinking.”

“Yeah, but a minute ago you were doing something else.”

Rush ignores him. He’s subjecting Sheppard’s shoulder to a ferocious inspection— the shoulder with the Sharpie map drawn across it.

Sheppard lets his head thud against the wall. He says resignedly, “I knew it was a bad idea to take my shirt off.”

“Yes, yes,” Rush says absently. He traces part of the map with one finger, which makes Sheppard shiver, and then shiver again. “It repeats,” Rush says.

“—What?” Sheppard says, swallowing.

“The map. Parts of the map repeat. But we’re clearly not going in circles; we’ve tried marking our path.”

They had. It had used up a whole power bar. That had been when Rush was still in his I-would-rather-die-than-consume-industrially-produced-American-so-called-foodstuffs phase, before he got hungry and decided that industrially produced American so-called foodstuffs were okay by him.

“So—“ Sheppard frowns, trying to think. It’s not easy when Rush is still _right there_ , so he shoves Rush away.

“What are you doing?” Rush demands, looking irritated.

“What do you think I’m doing? Put up or shut up, or maybe I should say: put out or get shut out.” Sheppard tries to get a good look at his shoulder.

Rush is looking sulky. “I sincerely doubt that _you_ are going to perceive any element that I’ve managed to overlook.”

“Yeah? I’m about to blow your mind, Einstein. Why would a maze repeat?”

Rush looks sulkier, and crosses his arms. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“What would be the _utility_ for a maze? What sorts of things repeat?”

Rush glares at him and doesn’t say anything.

“ _Fractals_ ,” Sheppard says. “ _Fractals_ repeat. And if you keep on going inside a fractal—“

“—You don’t get anywhere,” Rush says, with dawning comprehension. “You simply go further and further in.”

“We have to find a route that avoids the smaller parts of the fractal. Maybe we can map it out on _you_ for a change,” Sheppard says. “You can see how it feels. Speaking of which, grab me my—“

Aspects of the shirt-in-the-fountain situation that hadn’t seemed immediately relevant a few minutes ago suddenly seem very relevant indeed.

“Oh, fuck you,” he says, eyeing Rush in exasperation. “For real?”

Rush is, not surprisingly, unrepentant. “I think you’ll find we’re both adults, and capable of accepting responsibility for our own items of clothing,” he says, tossing his hair back.

Which is how Sheppard ends up bare-chested in just Rush’s camo jacket, drawing a route through six levels of fractal down the soft white flesh of Rush’s inner arm. And if he has to stop himself, now and then, from letting his eyes wander where they don’t need to, or brushing the pad of his thumb against a stretch of unmarked skin— if he thinks, with a sense of preemptive weariness, that it’s going to be hell getting turned on by the smell of Sharpies after this— then it’s a secret he would never tell to anybody except maybe the thermostats and transporters and water filtration systems of Atlantis, who have no human frame of reference, after all, and don’t need him to fit the excruciating sensation into words.

* * *

“I would, you know,” Sheppard says.

Rush throws him a harried look. “You would what? Fuck me? Feed me breakfast in the morning?”

Sheppard shrugs. “Yeah. I don’t know. Either. Both, I guess. But you don’t really seem like a breakfast guy, and I’m not on Earth much.”

It’s maybe not the most ideal time to be having this conversation, since they’re currently suspended in midair over a pitch-black pit, with only a transparent octagonal tile of glass separating the soles of their boots from the unpleasantly solid and rocky ground that’s waiting to slice-and-dice a human stew out of them. Well— technically, there are a lot of glass tiles, all of them forming a bridge from the door where Sheppard and Rush entered to the door where Sheppard and Rush would really like to exit. The trouble is that most of these glass tiles aren’t really what you would call _solid_ , as Sheppard and Rush have already discovered on their first attempt to walk over the bridge.

“Still,” Sheppard says, “I—“

Rush holds up a distracted hand. “Shh. Did you hear that?”

Sheppard stops and listens. “Hear what?” All he can hear are pebbles rattling somewhere, unseen in the darkness. One skips off several panels of glass up ahead and bounces further down into the canyon.

“That,” Rush breathes. “ _That._ ” He turns to Sheppard. “Have you got any coins?”

“What?”

“ _Idiot._ Coins!” Rush snaps his fingers. “Loose coins, pocket change!”

Sheppard makes a resentful face at him. “Well, yeah, but you’re gonna have to pay me back. You know every time I come back from Atlantis I find out that my money’s worth less and less?”

Rush takes the change and ignores the comment. He pitches a quarter at one of the pieces of glass nearest to them, tilting his head with a look of concentration, as though he’s listening to something. Then he takes another quarter and does it again, this time aiming for a different panel. Then a third one.

“I can’t hear anything,” Sheppard says. “Are you sure you’re—“

“ _Yes_ ,” Rush says impatiently. “Come on, it’s this one.”

Before Sheppard can stop him, he steps sure-footed to the leftmost panel— then looks over his shoulder with a huff of frustration, as though amazed that Sheppard isn’t already following him.

Sheppard looks down dubiously at the panels. “Okay,” he says. “But I gotta say, I didn’t really love breaking both of my shin bones the first time.”

Rush must know what he’s talking about, though, because the glass holds up underneath Sheppard. He stands and watches as Rush repeats his skipping-stones maneuver, this time tossing little glittering dimes out into the dark. Sheppard hears the coins hit the glass, but there’s nothing special about the noise. It’s just that: a noise, cheap coins rattling against a surface.

Rush, though— Rush is pale and hypnotized, staring out over the flat glass vista with eyes that seem oddly unprotected. Sheppard doesn’t know exactly what he means by that. Maybe only that Rush is usually all spikes and sharp edges, not so much a miniature Humvee of a man as something bristlier and more lethal that’s learned not to have to steamroll you to survive. You assume there’s something there that needs protecting, something desirable and rare and a little bit fragile that the rest has evolved around. He’d thought he’d seen that in Rush when Rush was drowning. But he hadn’t. It’s this: yet another deeper-down level, as dark as the one above it, but not as violent; a splinter of lodestone searching for its magnetic pole, longing to be skewered by the lines of invisible forces that would lend it some kind of purpose.

But at what cost?

At the cost of losing itself.

“Rush,” Sheppard says.

Rush doesn’t seem to hear him.

“ _Rush._ ”

Rush blinks, startled, and almost loses his balance. “Yes. Sorry. I’m—“ He looks down, uncertainly, at the fistfuls of coins he carries in his hands. “I’m—“

Sheppard looks at him for a while. “What are you listening to?” he says at last.

“Nothing. It’s nothing.” Rush shakes his head. “This is the right way. I’m certain.”

He steps forward, onto another panel of glass. And it _is_ the right way, and it keeps being the right way, but it also keeps getting harder and harder for Sheppard to snap Rush out of whatever trance he’s falling into, like he’s disappearing as they approach the outline of a door on the far side. Sheppard keeps his eyes fixed on the intersecting bars of light that form that outline, but he starts talking to Rush, casual-like, to try and keep him in his body, a long stream-of-consciousness ramble about the project he’s working on at Area 51, and the remote control drones he’s taking back to Atlantis so he and McKay can turn them into battlebots, and the surfing club he’s trying to start with Ronon, who turned out to be a pretty good surfer once he got the hang of it.

“You should come to Atlantis,” he says. “Not— I’m not saying that like a sex thing. I mean, we could if you wanted.”

It’s hard to imagine having sex with this version of Rush, though. In some ways there’s something about him that’s _more_ appealing— who wouldn’t want to touch the thing that no one gets to touch? But at the same time there’s nothing physical left in him. Nothing human.

“I don’t really do relationships, though,” Sheppard says. “I strictly love ’em and leave ’em. Well. Really they mostly leave me. That might be because I spend part of my time being a million-year-old city, sort of. I don’t know. I’ve never asked. Still—“

They’ve reached the other side of the pit. Sheppard steps off the glass, and onto the thin ledge of solid ground.

Rush just stands there, staring at the door like he doesn’t see it. His pupils have dilated, so his eyes look almost all black.

Sheppard reaches out and catches his hand. “Still,” he says. “You should come to Atlantis. I think you should come to Atlantis. Get away from—“

He doesn’t know what to say.

He pulls Rush forward, and pushes them both through the door.

* * *

As soon as the door closes behind them, Rush heaves a huge breath and folds his arms over his head. He looks agonized, or relieved, or somewhere in between the two options.

“I can’t—“ he says. “I can’t hear it, but I can still— it’s _still there_ , the crack, it _hasn’t sealed up_ ; I can _hear it_ ; I could hear _all_ of it if I just went back, if I—“

“Nope,” Sheppard says, taking him by the shoulders and steering him away from the door, which, anyways, has vanished, so there’s no going back, no matter how much Rush wants to. “I think we’re going to chill here for a while. Solve a new puzzle. That seems like a _much_ better idea.”

“You don’t _understand_ ,” Rush says, trying to wrench away from him.

Sheppard does understand. He knows the invitation. It’s in the walls and circuitry and in his bedroom, in his _bed_. In the gate and in the ZPMs and in the jumpers, a subliminal hum of promise: _you could be more than this_. More than that: _you could be more because you’re not like the others_. The warp to his being, the existential wrongness that put him on the outskirts, made him a ghost-figure that other people wished would go away— it turned into a gift, the opportunity for a not-aloneness that was not what he had wanted, but something more than he could have hoped for. All he had to do was open a door that he’d long ago let rust over. But he wasn’t— _really_ sure that he wanted to do that. Little by little he let the city take pieces of him; let it seep into him, annexing underlevels, like the sea on which it floated. Someday maybe there would be this… _consummation_. But not yet.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s just do the puzzle. I want to get out of here. I’ve got a city waiting. Remember?”

Rush seems to accept this. He at least lets Sheppard lead him to the center of the room.

It’s a more-or-less ordinary room. Kind of dark, with rosy light flickering out of cup-shaped fixtures at each corner. The walls are stone, but feel like adobe; the whole vibe reminds Sheppard of some place out in Santa Fe. He’s pretty sure a place out in Santa Fe wouldn’t have eight doors set into it, though, even if the doors are made of scrubby dark Southwestern-looking wood. Probably it also wouldn’t be empty except for a single wooden table with a large, irregularly-shaped, crystal box that’s set on top of it.

Sheppard reaches out cautiously and pokes the box with a single finger. He can tell it’s a box because it has keyholes— eight keyholes— but otherwise it doesn’t look much like a box. It reminds him of a ZPM, the way a ZPM’s sort of flame-shaped, if you could freeze a flame in action and hold it in your hands from blue base to smoky tip But a ZPM’s red and gold and all colors, and this has no color to it at all. Like ice, marred only by the dark teardrops of the keyholes, forming a delicate oval shape.

“What is it?” Rush asks.

Sheppard says, “At a guess, we’re supposed to unlock it. I’m assuming the keys are behind those doors.”

He looks at the eight doors with no small amount of trepidation. He’s also assuming that whatever’s going to kill him and Rush this time is behind them.

But when he and Rush try the first door, it doesn’t go anywhere fatal. Actually, what happens is definitely weirder: Sheppard turns its centered handle, and it creaks gently open to reveal a cloudy sky over a pasture, kempt green grass wet and backed by rolling hills.

The quality of green is familiar, and the foliage, and the white fence in the distance. Even the smell is familiar: pine trees after a rainstorm and churned-up turf. If they walked through the door and to the left, they’d find the tan rocky streak of a trail through the forest, edged with wildflowers and studded with horse shit. To the right and eventually they’d get to where the house is, rustic and painted the same white as the fence, with a swimming pool the color of an artificial diamond. At night the pool had glowed outside of Sheppard’s window. He doesn't remember anyone ever being allowed to swim in it.

“I don’t understand,” Rush says uncertainly. He’s standing just next to Sheppard. He stretches his hand through the doorway and catches a fistful of Virginia raindrops, then cautiously draws them back in. In the adobe room, his hand is still full of raindrops.

“It’s a memory,” Sheppard says. “It’s where I grew up.”

Rush’s perplexed frown deepens. “This is where you _grew up_?”

“One of the places,” Sheppard says. He walks through the door without much fanfare, out of the room and into the chilly haze of mist.

It’s as beautiful as he doesn’t remember. He’d thought about that when he and Ronon went back, after his dad died— that it was beautiful, and he hadn’t remembered it as beautiful. He thinks that part of real beauty, maybe, is something you can’t quite manage to lay a hand on, a vanishing-point that’s always a little bit out of your reach. When he was a kid, everything seemed controlled. People came to do the cleaning, so dust never gathered. Gardeners gardened, so the grass never seemed to grow. He wore a uniform at school, so he didn’t even pick his own clothing. And the uniform was always cleaned and pressed and laid out for him. He’d felt like the navy blazer: flattened to perfection, every wrinkled part of him a flaw waiting to be burned away.

What had surprised him, when he’d shown up to his dad’s funeral, was how much life had always been there, a half-inch to the left or under the surface. He hadn’t known how to look for it when he was a kid. So many secretly anarchic corners: a spiderweb glistening under the ledge of a barn window, clotted birds’ nests on a chimney, fat mushrooms whose fast spread signaled thousands of buried roots. There was a tool shed where the gardeners kept broken things, and things that were dirty. Cracked pottery planters, and stringy bulbs like shriveled witch-hearts, and rusted shears, and shovels caked in mulch.

He’d gone in there for a minute. This place he’d never known existed. It had smelled old, and warm, and dusty, and mildew-y, and good. He had closed his eyes, and breathed the scent in. This is where I belong, he’d thought. Here, with the broken things.

Now he sees it all around him, walking through this memory-landscape. The mud, the scuff-marks, the small imperfections, the native weeds spitting mouthfuls of themselves up where they can.

He thinks he knows what the point of this memory is, so he’s not surprised when he reaches the paddock and sees a dappled mare grazing in it. He folds his arms on the rail and leans forward, watching her.

“My wife’s family owned horses,” Rush says, a little haltingly, from beside him. “I’m afraid I never saw the attraction.”

“Animals are easier than people,” Sheppard says.

Rush looks at him quizzically.

“You don’t have to—“ Sheppard says and shrugs.

Rush says, “Finish your sentences?”

“Yeah,” Sheppard says. “That.” He watches the mare flick her ears. “That’s Millie.”

“Millie?”

“Short for Millennium Falcon. My dad sold her when I was twelve because she had bucked shins. He said she’d never be a champion. But me— I was just a stupid kid. I loved her. First time in my life I ever had something that—“ He stops. His mouth works, trying to find the right words. “I could love her,” he says at last, “and I didn’t have to worry about her loving me back. Everyone else wanted something from me. But not her. She just wanted me to love her.”

Rush doesn’t say anything.

They stand in the light rain and watch the horse. Millie.

Eventually, Rush says, “There’s a key on a string around her neck.”

“Yeah,” Sheppard says in a cracked voice. “I saw. I just—“

“Ah,” Rush says.

So they stay like that for another minute, before Sheppard swings himself over the fence into the paddock and takes the key, stopping only to touch the warm soft expanse of Millie’s nose for a second, and feel her whicker against the palm of his hand.

* * *

Before they try the second door, Rush stops Sheppard, looking uneasy. “I should warn you,” he says, “if each of these doors represents a memory, that there are—“ He looks away, the line of his mouth going flat. “Not everyone grew up in an American fucking recreation of _Brideshead Revisited_.”

But actually the place where they end up looks way more like _Brideshead Revisited_ than northern Virginia ever could. It’s all old stone buildings, _really_ old, the yellowy sort of old that’s well-cared-for, and touched by hundreds and hundreds of years of hands. Sheppard and Rush are standing in some little pie slice of garden, a patch of green between a crumbling wall and what might be a church, with spires and domes and types of rooftops that Sheppard doesn’t know the name for filling the white sky over them.

Rush is staring at the church-looking building, but he glances abruptly away when he sees Sheppard eyeing him. His arms come up across his chest defensively. “Admiring the fine architecture of St. John’s College?” he says, arch and bitter.

“Uh—“ Sheppard says. “I guess.”

“I was a student here,” Rush says.

He turns his back on the whole scene and walks over to the crumbling wall, kneeling down to pry at a loose brick down near the bottom.

“Buried treasure, huh?” Sheppard says.

Rush has to work hard to get the brick free. “I used to keep a packet of fags and a lighter here.”

“I get it. Sneaking a quick smoke when you got bored during really long lectures?”

“No.” Rush doesn’t elaborate. He digs the brick out of the wall and holds it for a second, consideringly, like he’s taking its weight into account, or inspecting it for signs of the quarry it was chipped from. After a while he hurls it away, but without much force, so that it thuds limply in the wet grass.

Rush doesn’t turn around. He lets his hands rest on his lap. “They would play a game,” he says in a halting, constrained voice. “Whenever I had to give an answer in class. One of them would say that he hadn’t heard me properly, and could I please repeat it. And then: could I please repeat it again. And: could I repeat it again. You got points, you see, for every time I had to repeat what I’d been saying. That was how the game was played. It was a joke. Because of my accent. If I refused, they would say I was being disruptive. I couldn’t hit them, because it was just—“ He gestures limply.

Sheppard doesn’t say anything.

“—What they wanted,” Rush finishes. He sounds exhausted. “It would have proved— but at the same time I— _Nine times_. Nine times, they managed once. I don’t even remember what it was I was saying. Something about the theorem of Liouville, I think. The tutor must have known. But he did nothing. In the end I would just— leave. I’d come out here and kick the wall. I kicked it till the brick came loose. Just— you know. Day after day. And then I liked the idea that there was at least a brick’s worth of space in the whole of Oxford that was _mine_. _I_ was the only one who knew it was there; _I_ was the one who’d made it.”

He reaches forward into the gap where the brick had been and stands. In his clenched fist is a scrap of red ribbon with a key dangling from the end of it.

“Stupid, really,” he says, staring at the key with a perplexed expression. “I’d had worse; they didn’t even hit me. It would have been beneath them to hit me. I doubt it even occurred to them. So why do you suppose…?”

He looks at Sheppard like he’s honestly expecting an answer. He’s confused; he wants to understand.

Sheppard reaches out and takes the key. His hand covers Rush’s for a minute.

“Come on,” he says, something in him aching. “Let’s get out of here.”

* * *

They go to a Wraith ship, where Sheppard leads Rush down dark hallways to take a key from one of the desiccated hands of Colonel Sumner’s husk— a corpse with eyes that almost look living, which was the part Sheppard hadn’t been able to stand, the part that still sometimes wakes him in up in a cold sweat. That the line was that thin, the barrier so collapsible, that there was so little difference between living and dead that sometimes you couldn’t know which one was which, or what was better.

Sumner crumbles to dust when Sheppard touches him. Sheppard flinches.

“I retract my statement about our comparative memories,” Rush says.

* * *

And, sure enough, Rush’s next memory is perfectly nice. Sort of suburban. The type of pretty-but-not-too-cookie-cutter house that you just know has all the latest appliances and a chic garden, maybe with a fruit tree. Something about the sunlight makes Sheppard thinks they’re in California, but Rush doesn’t comment on their location, and the look on his face warns Sheppard not to ask.

Inside, it’s just as stylish as Sheppard had expected. Clean and very minimalist. Rush navigates the halls at a brusque, businesslike speed, exactly the right pace not to give the impression that he wants to stop and look at the photographs on the walls, or that he’s specifically avoiding them. Well, presumably he’s seen them before, the photos, especially since he’s in them— him and the blonde woman who Sheppard’s guessing is his wife, in various fancy outfits: him in a crooked bowtie and tuxedo, with a bemused expression; her in a cabernet taffeta sheath dress; her in dramatic black and white, with a lily sewn into her hair; him with the buttons done up lopsided on the vest of his three-piece suit.

On the piano in the office that Rush leads Sheppard into, there’s a smaller picture of Rush in a frame. His hair’s a bird’s nest and he’s wearing a shapeless brown sweater. He’s balancing a laptop computer on his knees and he’s just looked up. The photographer has captured him in the moment of recognizing her face, everything tender in him rushing forwards for that one-instant reaction, before he can hide any of it again.

Sheppard thinks of Rush hurling his wedding ring into the starless sky, and finds it hard to look at the picture.

On the other side of the room, Rush lifts a glossy violin out of its velvet-lined case. Without any particular appearance of emotion, he jerks the violin back as though to smash it.

“Don’t!” Sheppard says, without even really thinking about it.

Rush flicks a flat, incurious glance at him. “This is where the key will be,” he says. “Trust me.”

“Yeah, but— you can just shake it out. Like a guitar, when you drop a pick in.” Sheppard reaches out for the violin. “You don’t have to break it.”

Rush doesn’t want to give him the violin at first. He pulls it away protectively, a gesture that’s kind of odd for someone who was going to turn the thing to splinters in the first place. But after the first hesitation, he lets Sheppard take it from him.

Sheppard cradles the little neck in one hand. There’s a thin smear of white dust across the violin’s narrow middle; it comes off on his finger when he touches it. It smells sweet. He turns the instrument over carefully. He can feel the key sliding around against the wood of its belly. He tries coaxing it out, tilting the violin this way and that till a loop of ribbon falls through one of the f-holes. Then he can fish the key out.

He hands the violin back to Rush. But now Rush doesn’t want to take it. Sheppard has to basically put it in his hands, and when he does, instead of putting it back into its case, Rush just stands there holding it like someone would hold a child they hadn’t trusted themselves to be given, something fragile and intensely loved and alive. There’s no particular expression on his face, nothing at all.

Finally he puts it down and turns his back on the case and on the music stand beside it, the pages of music taped together and annotated in pencil by a very small precise script, the bookshelves of scores and vinyl albums worn soft at the edges.

They leave the house as briskly as they came. Once they’re outside, in the sunshine, Rush stops for a second, suddenly breathing hard.

In a clipped voice, and without looking at Sheppard, he says, “I preferred the maze.”

* * *

Sheppard’s next memory is a fucking helicopter crash in a war zone. But he’s already relived this memory, back on M1B-129, so it doesn’t have the same force, or at least it shouldn’t, or at least he should know how to handle to force it has, but he still ends up down on his knees in the goddamn desert, with his hands pressed to Holland’s leg, even though Holland’s dead already, empty-eyed under his shaggy, sandy hair.

“I’m sorry,” Rush says quietly, from where he’s crouched in the lee of the low rocky hillside, sheltering from the dust getting spun up by the wind.

“Yeah, well,” Sheppard says. “It was a long time ago.” But he can’t seem to get up and leave Holland’s body, even after taking the key that was closed in the palm of Holland’s hand. “They should have told you,” he says eventually. “They should have warned you. I’m the guy who doesn’t bring my team back. That’s why I liked Antarctica. At least when I fucked up, I didn’t leave any bodies behind me.”

“I’ve left my fair share of bodies behind me,” Rush says. For some reason he’s staring down at the motionless palm of his hand. “Not, perhaps, so many as you.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

“No. Of course it doesn’t.” Rush scrubs his palm restlessly against the cotton camo of his BDUs and looks away. “Life finds a way. Isn’t that the line? It’s not a curse or a punishment, or even a reward— to keep living. What can live lives, in a universe that steadily, overwhelmingly, devouringly _does not want it to survive_. Biology: a big fuck-you to the radio silence of the cosmos. So you pick up and move on, because you’re a minuscule fleck of organic engine, and it doesn’t mean anything. Nothing does. In the end.”

Sheppard squints at him through the heavy layers of sunlight.

“It doesn’t bother me,” Rush says again.

“Liar,” Sheppard says.

But he stands up, and they pick their way back towards the doorway. Because there’s nothing else they can do. Because they’re alive.

* * *

Sheppard watches Rush beat the shit out of a portable radio in a pocket-sized kitchen with empty cabinets, where mildew is visibly eating enormous patches into the wallpaper’s sickly-flower print. A TV in the living room blares a staticky sitcom laugh track to an empty couch with continents of burn marks from the years of cigarettes that’ve have deposited a vague sticky brownish stain on every surface. The thin carpet stinks of beer. There’s a rickety coffee table in front of the TV, covered in ashtrays, but no other furniture in the room, and nothing— not a photo, not a flag, not a a Led Zeppelin poster or painting of Jesus or Mary or Joseph— on any of the scuffed-up apartment walls. The closest thing to decoration Sheppard sees is out in the hallway of the building, where someone, or maybe a combinations of authors, has or have scrawled _NO CUNTSSUCK COCK and EAT (susie mccabes) SHIT_ beside the busted elevators, with a drawing of a dick. He thinks about the stylish house in California, with its stainless steel, high-tech kitchen. The perfectly framed and spaced rows of photos, the crooked bowtie on their boyish, startled, almost bashful version of Rush.

In the kitchen, Rush finally succeeds in smashing the radio to pieces.

“Got it,” he says, emerging breathless with the key. He looks slightly feral. There’s something nervous and almost hunted about his eyes. “It was wired into the transistor. I’ve been wanting to gi’ that thing a tan for years. _Years_. It’s like a dream come true, this. I’m tempted to take that bat to the bloody television as well, just for the sheer fucking satisfaction. I could take it all apart, all of it. Brick by fucking brick.”

His accent’s gotten stronger since they showed up here.

“Let’s not forget what we came here for,” Sheppard says, feeling a little uneasy. He doesn’t think he likes this version of Rush.

Rush touches the knuckles of one fist to the wall, just lightly, like he’s measuring how they fit against it. There’s a shadowy dent a little bit higher-up, about the size and shape of his hand. It looks like the high water mark of a flood, the permanent reminder of how close to drowning you’d gotten.

Rush says, “As if I could forget.”

* * *

“I don’t know where the key is,” Sheppard says, frowning, when they cross through the seventh doorway.

He knows exactly where they are; they’re in his apartment on Earth. Well, the last apartment he had on Earth, before he stole a jumper and headed for Atlantis, and everyone sort of just tacitly acknowledged that he wasn’t planning on ever really coming back. It’s the only place he’s ever lived in Colorado Springs, and it sums up everything he hates about the place: a cute, cosy two-bedroom with a little balcony, designed for the white bread suburban couple with family plans. He could imagine exactly the kind of person who was supposed to live here: some kind of desk jockey Lieutenant Colonel, probably, with a pregnant wife and a passion for outdoor sports. Saturdays he’d go mountain biking with his buddies, and Sundays hit the local megachurch to feel better about himself for having helped send asshole kids to Afghanistan, where the medevac chopper would get shot down trying to rescue them from a bunch of orphaned goatherders for whom America might as well have been the moon.

I’m that guy now, Sheppard had thought to himself. I might as well be that guy. He’d bought an IKEA showroom and tacked his Johnny Cash poster over his bed, and fell asleep feeling like someone had cut off his hand— a feeling he’d only be able to identify later, when someone did (sort of) cut off his hand, and the confusion he felt was familiar. Why am I a different shape now? Why don’t I know my own body? Why can’t I touch things the way I want to touch them? Why don’t they touch me back?

“This isn’t a significant location?” Rush asks. He crosses the room to the kitchen counter and wrinkles his nose at a red Solo cup that probably still has a half-inch of rum and Coke in it.

“No, it is. But I—“ Sheppard struggles to explain. “It’s what’s not here,” is what he comes up with. “Atlantis. I lived here when that ship of Dark Ages Ancients showed up and wanted to take Atlantis. We got sent to Earth. I thought it was all over. I thought—“

When he tries to remember what it’d felt like, he has to turn away from Rush and face the balcony, chewing his lip and curling his hands at his sides.

“I always thought I would die there,” he says. “That’s how it’s supposed it work, when you find the thing you’re for. You go through the wardrobe, they’re not supposed to send you back. Not like that. Not… They were still gonna let me go offworld sometimes, but I’d come home to this goddamn apartment in Colorado, where everything around me felt… dead.”

“Is there something you’re supposed to smash, do you think?” Rush asks. “It certainly sounds as though that’s what you ought to have been doing. Some Air Force general’s face, perhaps.”

“That’s not how it works,” Sheppard says.

“Isn’t it? I’ve found it remarkably effective when it comes to getting my way since my induction into the Stargate Program.”

“Jesus, what is it with you, anyway? You don’t have to _attack_ everything you encounter.” Sheppard makes a irritated sound. “Plus, I wouldn’t exactly call a broken nose _getting your way._ ”

Rush ignores him, although he does touch to the blue-black underside of his eye with a grimace. “It works,” he says. “I regret not trying it in academia when I had the chance.”

“Well, in the Air Force you have to eat it,” Sheppard says tersely. “You learn that early. Just— swallow it down. It’s better if you’re the one who’s hurting, at least if nobody can see it. I was really bad at that.”

“—Ah,” Rush says, in a different voice, kind of strange. When Sheppard looks at him, he’s staring at the floor with an expression of distant concentration, like he’s thinking about something else and seeing it there.

That’s frustrating to Sheppard, a little bit. This is _his memory_ , he thinks. It's _important_.

“I’ve never smashed anything,” he says, hearing the echo of anger in his voice. “I didn’t get to. And it wouldn’t have done any good, anyway; I wanted to smash the shit out of everything around me, but I knew— there was nothing inside any of it that mattered; that was the _problem._ There was _nothing inside it;_ there was no _key_ ; there was no magic solution. If I was going to start smashing things, I would’ve had to smash myself first.”

And then he chokes and coughs, a long hacking cough, because something’s stuck in his airway. He coughs and coughs until he feels like he’ll never breathe again, and tastes metal at the back of his mouth, and when at last he sucks in a long gasp of air, he’s holding a small key in his hand.

* * *

The last door brings them to another apartment. This one’s in Colorado Springs, too, judging by the ridge of mountains Sheppard can see through the windows. But it’s not a place he recognizes. He figures maybe it belongs to Rush, although it’s not really Rush’s style, with the leather couch and the plasma television and the Clint Eastwood DVDs and the desultory collection of airport paperbacks clustered on a shelf. So he doesn’t know whose it is, or why Rush is wearing that expression, like someone just took a hammer to him and he’s trying to hold together the broken pieces of his face.

But there are some things you can take a pretty good guess at. “No one to get back to, huh?” Sheppard says.

Rush shakes his head in a jerky gesture. “It— isn’t like that. It doesn’t matter.”

“Seems like it matters.”

Sheppard’s not hurt. Not really. It’s… nice, to think that someone like Rush, smart and spooky and ferocious, a goddamn Fields medalist, and really good-looking in a nervous kind of way, would want to kiss him. And Rush would understand, if anyone would, the piece that was missing-but-not-really-missing, the part of Sheppard that was made up by other things. A whole future had unfolded itself in front of Sheppard like a flower in slow motion, one of the flowers that bloomed in the morning and closed up again at the end of the day. But he doesn’t _know_ Rush, and he doesn't think he has it in him to know Rush— or to know anybody, maybe, not after so many years of trying not to know or be known. Rush is more than Sheppard wants. Too much.

“It doesn’t matter,” Rush says again in a constrained voice. “It’s nothing.”

“Yeah?” Sheppard sighs. “Okay. So where are we going to find a key in all this nothing?”

Someone knocks on the door.

Rush freezes. “Don’t answer it,” he says.

Sheppard gives him a  _look._  “Uh, you don’t think it might be important?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“It’s not.”

Sheppard ignores him and opens the door. He’s not really sure what to expect, because there haven’t been any actual _people_ in these little scenes, apart from Holland, who’d been dead. It’s always seemed, in every place, like the people had stepped out right before Sheppard and Rush got there. They’d return at any minute. In the place where Rush had grown up, there’d still been smoke curling from a half-extinguished cigarette. Just— no people. They were alone, Rush and Sheppard.

The first other living person who who's managed to show up in this unreal landscape is, of all people, Everett Young, standing in the doorway of what must be his home, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. He looks softly rumpled and appealing in a way that Sheppard’s never seen him— not soldiered-up all the way, and like he’s just rolled out of bed.

Young’s eyes settle on Rush, as though Sheppard’s not there. “Do I get to come in?” he says.

Rush won’t look at him. “You live here,” he says stiffly. “What the fuck are you asking me for?”

“Do I?” Young says. “Are you sure?”

Rush continues staring resolutely at the floor, his arms folded. “I don’t understand the purpose of this conversation.”

“Someone told me you needed a key,” Young says. He holds out his hand, the key dangling from it on a worn piece of string. “I wanted you to have it.”

Rush steps forward and snatches the key from him, then retreats until he encounters the sofa and physically can’t retreat anymore.

“What, no thank you?” Young says. There’s a gentle look on his face, the lines at the sides of his eyes crinkled with a worn smile-about-to-happen.

“You’re not real,” Rush says. His voices splits on the final word, turning it into two syllables.

“Do you want me to be?”

“Fuck you.”

“Hotshot,” Young says, “that’s not an answer.”

Rush turns away, towards the Ancient doorway that’s still visible in the vicinity of the kitchen. “I’m leaving. We’re leaving. I don’t have to listen to this.” He glances sharply at Sheppard, a demand that Sheppard back his play.

Sheppard does, with some reluctance.

“It was always a test of resolve,” Young calls after them, now sounding not quite like Young. “You know that, right? You knew from the start that it would be.”

Rush doesn’t look back. Only Sheppard can see what’s happening on his face: the pieces not quite holding together any longer, the obvious effort Rush is putting into trying to hide the fracture planes. Sheppard reaches out to lay a reassuring hand on his shoulder, but Rush jerks away with a wordless violent sound.

“Don’t touch me,” he says. “Don’t you dare.”

* * *

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Rush says immediately, turning away, as soon as they’re back in the adobe room.

“Don’t worry,” Sheppard says. “I’m not really a talking guy.”

“People say that. And yet.”

“Well,” Sheppard says, “you kind of give off a vibe like you might need to do some talking.”

“Fuck you,” Rush says with savage precision.

Sheppard shrugs resignedly. He doesn’t know why he expected anything different from Rush. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “Fair enough. So, what do you say we unlock this thing?”

They gather all eight keys on the table. The keys are snub-nosed little things, but pretty: with the distinctly Ancient style of metalworking that Sheppard sometimes sees on Atlantis in items that are older than the city.

Each one of the tiny keys fits a lock. Rush turns them as they go in, with an audible clicking. The crystal begins to glow like the ZPM it resembles, with a humming sound, until, when Rush turns the last key, it’s so bright that Sheppard can’t look.

The whole thing splits in half. Inside is something white-hot and radiant, concealed at the very center. Sheppard’s shielding his eyes and can’t see exactly what it is.

Rush reaches in to touch it— and then recoils with a bitten-off noise of pain.

“What?” Sheppard says, alarmed. “What happened?”

The light from the crystal starts dying.

“ _Rush_ ,” Sheppard says. “Are you okay?”

Rush stares down at his right palm, where he’s cradling it close to his body. “I’m—“ he says. “It startled me.”

He holds his hand up so Sheppard can see. Burned into it, a thread-thin silvery brand, is the outline of a constellation. Sheppard recognizes it. It’s Scutum, the constellation that the Ancients called _auspis_ , the shield. It’s one of the Milky Way stargate glyphs.

“There was a piece of glass in the same shape,” Rush says. “When I touched it, it vanished.”

He sounds vaguely disturbed, but not as much as he probably should be. Sheppard wonders if the implications have occurred to him yet. Is this real, Rush had wondered. They’d both wondered. I have a body, Rush had said. On the spectrum of reality, where is that body at the moment? Where is it on the spectrum of solidness? Is it possible that you can touch something and make it part of your body? Is it that easy for a ghost to get under your skin?

For some reason, he’s thinking again about the Kolya-who-wasn’t-really-Kolya, in the Sakari hallucination he’d had. Kolya had cut off Sheppard’s hand, because he’d needed the Ancient gene, and didn’t have it. It was a simple solution. On the level of genetics, Sheppard was just a piece of flesh. Sheppard had marveled at it: how easy it was to add and subtract things from a body, from an outside perspective. Kolya had matter-of-factly pulled out a knife. He hadn’t cared what kind of body Sheppard would be, after. How Sheppard would change, in order to make sense of himself.

But it had not been real. For a given value.

And now this. Is the silver shape on Rush’s hand real?

"Does it hurt?" Sheppard asks

Rush looks at him like he's stupid. He says, as though it should be obvious, "Of course it hurts."

Sheppard feels like he should clarify what he was asking— that what Rush had taken as some kind of existential question, Sheppard had just meant as a way of figuring out if Rush was okay, if Rush was—

But a door creaks open, drawing their attention.

The eight doors that had marked the perimeter of the room are gone. In their place, a single dark door offers an exit.

Sheppard glances at Rush, to find that Rush has glanced at him in the same moment.

“The way out,” Rush says.

“Optimistic of you,” Sheppard says grimly.

“We’ve got what we came for already. This is it. The glyph.”

“Optimistic of you,” Sheppard says again.

* * *

It isn’t the way out.

In the courtyard, in the unthinkable time, hours or days or weeks distant when Sheppard hadn’t known Rush yet, he’d told Rush that the city was dead. The city the hologram had shown them like a whisper of a promise. The _original_ city. Where they’d come from. (And who, Sheppard thinks to himself, does he mean when he says _they?_ ) It’s dead, Sheppard had said. He’d known he could not explain to Rush, who had never been to Atlantis, how a city could be dead and not dead. Rush didn’t know what it was for a city to be _alive_.

But now Rush and Sheppard stand in the transparent chamber that crowns one of the Alteran city’s towers, like a glassblower’s bubble set on the stem of a pipette, its fragile shape kept intact by some unseen pulse of breathing. All around them is the blue-white crystal machinery that is older than Atlantis, yet at the same time more advanced. They had lost something, the Ancients, when they left this galaxy behind them.

They had lost this city. It spreads below the tower in every direction: a score of other towers, silver stalks of wildflowers carrying the glass petals of their windows; the trinium bridges; the river curving as thin and bright as the shining burn on Rush’s hand, white in the sunlight and mapping its own kind of asterism. Temples glow along the river’s sides, pillared and skimming their steps down to the dark silk skirt of the water. Follow the line of the river and you can see where the fields start, outside the city. The lilies. God. The rows of the lilies. Bigger than flowers on Earth; made for a different sun. They must just run wild now, in a grief-stricken riot of tangles.

Because no one has lived in this city for a long time.

And the city knows.

The city has been waiting.

Every day, for millennia, it has waited.

“It doesn’t understand,” Rush whispers, in a voice on the verge of cracking. “It doesn’t know why they left it.”

Sheppard doesn’t say anything. He feels so tired. All along, the things they’ve done have just rolled off his body— the miles they walked in the maze, every miserable death, the hours spent spilling his guts to Rush and trying to keep Rush’s spilled guts together in turn, the weight of it, which ought to have left him fucking beat-down and raw. Now it settles on him and he can’t move, he thinks, he can’t do this, he can’t fucking bear it.

“It’s _alone,_ ” Rush says, and his voice _does_ crack.

The monitors around the room are awakening, flickering with bluish sleepiness to life. They sense the presence of something that can—

Something that can dream with them, Sheppard thinks. That might want to dream with them.

He can feel it in every part of his mind.

“I didn’t know how to tell you,” Sheppard says unsteadily. “The genetic requirement— it’s not a test. It was never about passing. It was never about deserving. It was about _this_."

“Yes."

“So that what they built could _know_ them.”

“So they could know each other,” Rush says. Sheppard thinks that if he looked over right now, he would see that Rush’s face was wet. “They were never supposed to be separated.”

It presses in on Sheppard until he doesn’t know what’s his own suffering and what isn’t, which parts of the suffering belong to him. The ceaseless grief of that separateness. So many circuits, fey and feral as abandoned children, mouthing at the edges of his thoughts, wanting so badly to be loved, and not sure any longer if they know the process. How does one initiate the program? —After all this time?

“I can’t stand this,” Rush says. His arms are folded over his head. Sheppard does look at him then, and, yes, Rush is crying. But more than that: he looks agonized, sick. “I can’t; I— can you _hear_ that? “

“What?” Sheppard says. A vague sense of alarm catches him through his exhaustion. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s _out of tune_. It’s _missing notes._ ”

“What notes? Rush, what do you mean?”

Rush’s blinks. His eyes have gone slightly unfocused, Sheppard notices with creeping unease. “If I could just find the crack,” Rush says, “then I could _fix_ it. But I can’t _leave_.”

“We _are_ leaving,” Sheppard says.

“And _abandon_ it?”

Sheppard takes him by the shoulders. “Listen to me. There’s nothing you can do for this city. You think I don’t know? It loves you. I know. It wants to love you. It wants you to love it back. But you _can’t_. You can’t be enough. It will _eat you up_. And— I don’t know if that’s the worst thing in the world or the best, to be part of that kind of something. I don’t know. But I know that right now that’s not what you want.”

“I _do_ ,” Rush says, shoving ineffectually against Sheppard’s grip.

“You don’t. You have someone waiting for you. You have work to do. We have to go back.”

He’s been looking for an exit, another magic door that’ll take them anywhere but here. And he sees it: unobtrusive and unmarked but for the _auspis_ -shaped pattern at the level and location that a lock would be.

“We have to go back,” he says again, with a hint of desperation.

The bitch of it is that he doesn’t want to, either. If Rush tried just a little bit harder, he thinks, they wouldn’t leave. They would stay here amid the hidden chambers already unlocking. Every stair would sing. Every door would open at their touch. He would know Rush’s inner mind and Rush would know his own secrets, because they would not be Rush and Sheppard any more, but only city-parts. He doesn’t not want that. Imagine. An eternal unfolding, the blossoming of an endless technological spring, the childhood that Rush didn’t have and Sheppard didn’t enjoy, but with the hunger of a new adolescence, so that as they played in the white ruins of the city, learning their own body, they would be learning each other’s bodies, too: establishing taxonomies of how those bodies could touch one another and comprehending, at last, maybe, through the mediating structure of circuits, the mechanics of how one could love and be loved by, with, in them.

Sheppard is kissing Rush without meaning to or memory of starting, their mouths melding together, urgent and hot. Rush pushes aside the camo jacket and has his hands on Sheppard’s bare chest, pulling him closer, breathing in frantic wet sounds. He tastes like salt and trinium. Sheppard wants him. But—

“No,” Sheppard says, breaking away. “We have to go back. We—”

Rush gazes at him, uncomprehending. The pupils of his eyes are wide and black.

It isn't him Sheppard wants, he thinks. He wants the Rush that is himself, that is the ghost-city that, in another universe, they could give their bodies to. But they can't do that in this universe. He can't let it happen.

He struggles to find some reserve of strength— a reserve that feels, at this point, like it’s located somewhere around the soles of his boots. He pushes Rush away from him, towards the door, a shove that sends Rush stumbling. Then, belatedly, manages to follow. 

Rush looks at the door, but doesn’t make a move to open it. So Sheppard tries first, fumbling for a latch or trigger of some kind, then pounding against it. It doesn’t work. But of course it wouldn’t, would it? None of this has really been about Sheppard. It’s been about Rush.

“You have to do it,” Sheppard says to Rush. “You have to open it. Please.”

That makes it easier in some ways. That it’s not about him. This isn’t his galaxy, he thinks; this isn’t his home; he has a home, he has a home, he has a _home_.

“Home,” Rush murmurs, like he can hear what Sheppard’s thinking.

“Yeah. You have to take us home. Think about going home.”

Rush stares at him, brow furrowed in confusion. “I don’t…” he says uncertainly.

“You _do,_ ” Sheppard says, exhausted. “Listen to me. You _do_ have a home. We were on a planet with two moons. In the Milky Way galaxy. I told Young I’d bring you back. You live with him, I think. Remember? He’s hurt; he couldn’t come on this mission. He lives in an apartment with a leather couch. You can see the mountains from the window. In Colorado Springs. Just east of the Rockies.”

Rush closes his eyes. He whispers, “The great bison belt.”

That doesn’t mean anything to Sheppard. But it must mean something to Rush, because Rush— suddenly certain and decisive— lifts his hand up and pushes his palm against the door.

Light flares all around them.

Sheppard’s last coherent thought is the sudden awareness of being alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first puzzle that Sheppard and Rush solve is a version of [Boolos's "Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hardest_Logic_Puzzle_Ever)
> 
> You can read about the Penrose Unilluminable Room [here.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumination_problem)
> 
> A number of fractal mazes have been designed— see [here.](https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/37675/alice-and-the-fractal-hedge-maze)
> 
> "Epnia xoret, neden menet" is similar to a saying from Heraclitus.


	21. Chapter 21

Mitchell came back to the infirmary after he’d finished briefing Nasir, while Young was still waiting on the results from his X-rays. Alaniz, the medical officer who’d been brought in to crew this mission, had given him a grim-faced once-over that exuded disapproval, checking to make sure there was no internal bleeding and his bones were still more-or-less in the right place. Then she’d left to oversee the imaging. She hadn’t offered painkillers and Young hadn’t asked for any. They both knew, he thought, that he’d done this to himself. So after she’d gone, he’d stayed stretched out on one of the gurneys, basically immobile, staring at the overhead light fixture, which kept blurring into unsteady haloes of agony, and trying not to think about all the parts of him that hurt.

When Mitchell showed up, Young shot him a quick glance and then redirected his gaze to the ceiling.

Mitchell leaned against the adjoining gurney and didn’t say anything. After a while he crossed his arms across his chest.

“I know,” Young said without looking at him. “I already know. Let’s pretend you’ve already given me the lecture, and you can save it. I’m sure it was a really good one.”

Mitchell shook his head slowly. “Brody and Jackson are on a line to the geeks back home,” he said in a clipped voice. “They reckon the tide should go down in about an hour. Nasir’s got the ship scanning for life signs every ten minutes or so, just in case.”

Young nodded stiffly.

“We’re trying to control the spread of information. Obviously everybody in a position to know the know’s been brought in special for this mission and vetted, but Jackson was pretty damn pushy about not dropping Rush’s name around.”

“Good,” Young said. “That’s good. You gotta keep him out of this, Cam. As much as possible.”

“Yeah, that’s what everyone keeps telling me.” Mitchell’s jaw worked. “Even though no one’ll come out and give me the full scoop on _why_ , just that he’s got these hot genes and they need him for some quote unquote _special project._ Jackson keeps telling me more than he should be telling me, dropping what he thinks are subtle hints.”

“Yeah,” Young said. “I’m starting to realize he does that.”

“But they told _you_ ,” Mitchell said. “Even though a couple weeks ago you were coming to _me_ for info. Which kinda makes me think that on a spectrum from Jack O’Neill to ripping my BDUs off and showing a Sixth House insignia tattooed on my ass, general opinion is I’m somewhere around the midway point.”

“No,” Young said quickly, and then couldn’t back the _no_ up. “Not more than anybody else is. That’s not— it’s not that simple. It’s not just them versus us. Or— I mean, it is, but it’s more complicated, too. Christ.” He wiped a hand down his face. He was sweating at his hairline.

“The Jackson versus Telford thing,” Mitchell said.

“Jackson versus Telford. Us versus the Alliance. Me versus everybody, maybe. Rush versus himself.” Young was aware that he was saying more than he ought to be saying. The words seemed to just be slipping out, leaking through the thousand weak spots in his normally pretty blocky willpower, which had been under siege for a while by the pain. “I’m gonna have to get somebody to dope me up, Cam. Don’t tell the others. I can’t keep going like this.”

“No shit,” Mitchell said. He sounded tired. “You’re not keeping-going anywhere.”

“No,” Young said, struggling to sit up, because that wasn’t what he’d meant. “I’m going back to the planet as soon as the tide goes down.”

“You sure as shit are not.”

“I can’t stay here,” Young said. He reached out to catch at Mitchell’s sleeve. “If he’s down there— if he’s down there, Cam— I’m supposed to _protect_ him. I should’ve gone on the mission. I shouldn’t’ve let Sheppard do it.”

“Everett,” Mitchell said. He said it in a gentle, clinical tone. He never called Young _Everett._ It was always _V_ or _Young_. “You could not have gone on that mission. You shouldn’t have come on _this_ mission. I know you got the same lecture I got. I know you got it every week when you were in the hospital, and you got it when you were in halfway housing, doing gait training and rehab. _Your life is not going to be the same now_. _You’re not getting your old body back._ Your goal’s to get the new one as monkey-chickened as it’s getting, right? That’s what they tell you. Like— different mission, just as capable. Every DBA in there is thinking, Fuck you, suckers. But there’s only so much fucking you can do before that dog is done.”

Young looked away. His eyes were watering. “That how they teach you sons-of-bitches to talk in Kansas?” he asked with some effort.

“It sucks,” Mitchell said. “What happened to you.”

“ _You_ walked out of there,” Young said. “Big goddamn hero. And now you’re leading SG-1.”

“It _sucks_ ,” Mitchell repeated, raising his voice. “I know. What happened. But it _happened_. Bullshitting yourself isn’t going to make a difference.”

“It wasn’t bullshit for you,” Young said.

“I’m not driving the bus at your goddamn funeral because you sent yourself on some mission you should never have been cleared for.”

“You think I can’t do what you did? Come back from it? I _can.”_

Mitchell was staring at the floor. “I won’t do it,” he said. “If Alaniz clears you, I can’t stop you from coming planetside. But I’m telling Landry it was a mistake to send you.”

“Fuck you,” Young said hoarsely.

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” Mitchell glanced up. He did look sorry. But it didn’t make a fucking difference.

Alaniz came in then, and Mitchell left, spouting some final platitudes that Young didn’t really listen to. He was trying to control the breath that kept stopping and starting in his body, like he was getting punched over and over again in the chest.

After Mitchell was gone, Alaniz— holding a portable tablet computer and perched on a tool beside the bed— was silent for a moment. “Well,” she said at last. “Looks like somebody stole my thunder.”

Young covered his eyes with a hand. “Is there any way I can get, like, a fistful of Percocet before we do this? This isn’t drug-seeking behavior; I just think I might throw up in the near future.”

“—Okay,” Alaniz said. She rose, and went somewhere else, and came back with a couple of bottles. She measured out some tablets. “Painkiller. Anti-inflammatory. Muscle relaxant. We’re going for the triple combo.”

She handed Young a paper cup of water with the pills, and he swallowed them.

Alaniz watched him. She was a pretty girl, about Lam’s age, maybe, but darker-skinned, with wire-framed spectacles and slightly curly, coal-black hair. “I looked at your X-rays,” she said after a while, when Young was done drinking.

“Uh-huh. So now you know me, inside and out.”

“I already did.” She took the empty cup back from him. “I was there when the _Odyssey_ intercepted your ship. Assisting van Densen. She made the call not to try to transport you. She didn’t think you would make it. We had to do the initial surgery here. It was one of the worst injuries I’ve seen in the field, and I was in the desert before this. I saw an ANA soldier with his legs blown off.”

“That’s a hell of a lot worse than what happened to me,” Young said.

Alaniz shook her head. “He couldn’t really feel anything at at that point. He didn’t know what was going on. You were in pain. It was a good sign that you were in pain, but I still— your hip was _destroyed_ , you know. We had to put it back together. There was dust from that fucking planet in everything. You were in spinal shock. Three of your vertebrae were split open like fucking chestnuts.”

“—I don’t want to hear this,” Young said.

“I think you need to hear this,” Alaniz said. “You don’t remember, do you?”

Slowly, Young shook his head. “Not till I got back to Earth.”

There’d been a brief awareness that he had changed location— something different in the texture or smell of the air. He’d wanted to know where David was. If David had made it. Then nothing for a while, just blurred voices, till he was opening his eyes and Emily was there.

“The mind is funny sometimes,” Alaniz said. “Things scramble it. You think that memory is an ironclad record of the truth, but it’s not. You were here. You were conscious. They brought you in with Colonel Telford. Everyone thought that he was gonna be the red tag, because there was so much blood. But I knew right away, because you were making this noise, and it’s not a noise that someone makes until it’s not really them talking, just their body. Just— because of the pain. We gave you morphine till you stopped making that noise. Van Densen still thought you weren’t going to make it. I mean, she thought you weren’t going to make it whether we transported you or not. She said the least we could do was make sure you weren’t in pain. But you actually sort of cleared up after that, while we were prepping for surgery. You were lying back there.” She jerked her head to indicate somewhere past her left shoulder. “And I held your hand. You looked at me, and you said, _Everything’s in pieces._ I don’t know if you were talking about your leg, or if you could feel, you know, with your hip— but I said, _Don’t worry, hon, I’ve done harder jigsaw puzzles, and a hell of a lot worse-looking ones than you_.”

Young managed a wan grin at that, in spite of himself. “Yeah?”

“Big fat lie, of course. But I was so goddamn determined that we were gonna bring you home.”

“Well, I appreciate it,” Young said.

“Sure as hell doesn’t seem like you do.”

That took him off guard. His smile dropped. “What?”

Alaniz tipped her head towards the door. “Colonel Mitchell’s right,” she said. “You had no business being on this mission. I’m guessing you cleared yourself, right?”

Young ducked his head in a kind of half-nod, and then found himself unable to meet her eyes.

“You know how I know?”

“I bet you’re going to tell me.”

“Because no one else would’ve cleared you. _No one_. I want to show you something.”

She worked on her computer tablet for a minute, and then held it up to face him. He was greeted by the ghostly image of his own insides: the bright white of the screws and plates holding him together, so much denser-looking than his unsolid spinal bones and pelvis, like he was just a cloud that happened to be filling the air around them.

He turned his head away. “I’ve seen it before. Did I break something new?”

“No,” Alaniz said. She sounded tired. “No, you didn’t break anything new. Do you even know how this works? I mean, I’m assuming someone told you, but I know with you flyboys it sometimes takes a few rounds to get it through your heads.”

“I know how it works,” Young said tersely.

“You think you’re healed cause you can walk. Just like new. All better. You can point to the scars from the surgery, and they’re not bleeding, so you must be good to go.”

“ _I know how it works_ ,” Young said, louder.

“You are not all better,” Alaniz said. Her voice was calm, and level, and remorseless. “You may never be all better. You sure as hell will never be just like new. You know what a fracture plane is?”

He made a noise somewhere between despair and frustration. She must have taken it as a yes.

“Your body is full of places it wants to break at, because it’s gotten broken there already. It’s trying to make new _stuff_ that doesn’t have that memory, new muscles and tendons and bone. But you’re not giving it a chance. You keep killing everything that starts growing. And eventually what you’re going to teach it is not to try to do that anymore. —Look at me,” she said.

Young turned his head unwillingly and saw that she was still holding up the tablet.

“This—“ she said, pointing with a pen to the angled white screws on the X-ray— “is good, because it’s holding your bones together so that that new _stuff_ can even happen. If your body rejects this, if it shears off, you’re pretty fucked, just plainly speaking. You _need_ this. But we cut you open and stuck a bunch of metal inside you. There was never a chance that you were going to be _like new_. Not in five months; not in five years. We gave you a chance to be alive. That’s what we could give you. A chance to grow a new body that could do some of the shit we knew you’d want to keep doing— to walk and put on your uniform and throw a goddamn football,  _maybe_  see active duty. And you are _throwing away that chance_. You might’ve thrown it away already.”

“Bullshit.”

“I can honestly tell you,” Alaniz said, “that, in my considered opinion, you will never meet the requirements for active duty again.”

“ _Bullshit_ ,” Young said in a low voice.

“You are _alive_ ,” Alaniz returned sharply. “How is that not enough for you?”

“They gave me a post. Landry and O’Neill. They must’ve thought I could do it. They gave me Icarus.”

“Then you’re gonna be running it from the sidelines.”

“Like hell I am,” Young said.

He felt, in some hard numb way, like maybe Alaniz wasn’t real, wasn’t here. All she was doing was saying the words he’d formed in his own head when he’d gotten back to his apartment after the Lucian attack. He’d known that his appointment would be temporary; had come to terms with it already; had already started mourning for it, like he had traveled in time back from a future where the inevitable fuck-up had happened or where his fucked-up body had given out on him. What did you do at a wake? You drank. So he’d figured he might as well get started.

But then he’d read the files, and—

“There’s shit I’ve gotta do,” he said. “I’m not going to let some kind of— _minor setback_ stop me.”

Alaniz turned off the tablet and set it aside. She placed her hands on the edge of the gurney. “You are not hearing me,” she said, measuring out each word precisely. “This is not a minor setback. _This is your body now._ You don’t have a choice. I hate to break it to you— I’m sure you’re a badass— but this is the real world, and courage doesn’t magically conquer all. The sooner you accept that you are not capable of—“

“You don’t know what I’m capable of,” he said, too fast.

“No,” Alaniz said. “I don’t. And I don’t think you do, either.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Her face was set. She turned aside, preparing to stand.

Young grabbed the paper cup from the bedside stand and crumpled it into a small, dense mass that he could hurl across the room. “What the hell does that mean?” he demanded.

He had thought that his fury would mean something, maybe— that he could intimidate her with the petty, futile violence, or with the sound of his scraped-raw despair. But of course he couldn’t; she was probably tougher than he was. For all he knew, she’d held his bones together with her bare hands. She just turned a cool, remote, unflinching eye on him.

“I’m issuing you a formal reprimand,” she said. “For using the chain of command to circumvent medical orders.”

“Landry signed off on the damn mission!”

“And it sounds like Colonel Mitchell’s going to take care of him.” She stood.

“Wait,” Young said, changing his tone. “Wait. You have to let me go back to the planet.”

“Not happening.”

“Please. You have to. You _have_ to. There’s someone down there I have to protect.”

“You’ve got a whole team who—“

“They can’t,” Young said. His voice had gone almost reedy with the need to communicate with her, the desperation to make her understand. “I can’t trust them to, not really, not _absolutely_. Look— you know why you’re here, and I could sit here and tell you that I’m the acting head of a highly-classified, urgent project, so you have to listen to me, and I know all kinds of things that you don’t know, and I am, and probably you do, and _I_ do. But I’m not telling you that.”

“Good,” Alaniz said in a clipped voice. “I’m not impressed.”

But she was listening.

“You know why you’re here,” Young said.

She frowned, and made an uncertain gesture with a hand. “Sure. I’ve been out with the _Daedalus_ , running missions back and forth to Atlantis. One thing and another, they could clear me of any Lucian involvement. Whatever’s going on planetside, they couldn’t risk the Alliance finding out about it.”

“Right. They couldn’t risk the Alliance finding out what was going on. But more importantly, they couldn’t risk the Alliance finding out _who was here_. Because there’s someone down there— he _is_ down there; he _has_ to still be down there— who is _so important—_ “ His voice caught, and he looked away.

Something had minutely shifted in Alaniz’s expression, as though she had seen Young for the first time, or maybe seen him as more than a collection of ghostly bones and metal hardware.

“Even if I could trust everyone on this ship not to be Lucian Alliance, which, I’ve gotta tell you, is a pretty big ask— even then, there are about seven different reasons I might not trust them to look out for him, because he’s _important_ , and I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but people who are important stop being people. And I’m not going to let that happen to him. Bench me later if you have to. But I’m going down there.”

There was a long silence. Young felt scraped raw by Alaniz’s eyes. She was trying to measure, he thought, some inner part of him.

Finally she sighed. “When you get back to Earth, you’re going on crutches. The only reason I’m not giving you some now is because we don’t have any on board the ship. Active duty is off the table for the foreseeable future, pending a full medical reevaluation. But if the call comes to go planetside…”

Young let his head drop back against the pillow. “Thank you.”

“You _cannot_ run. You _cannot_ lift anything. I am _very_ serious about this.”

“I got it.”

“I’m trying to _protect_ you,” Alaniz said. There was an unusual, almost emotional vehemence in the statement. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, looking weary. “You get that, right? I’m tired of sewing people up, just for them to end back up here, broken.”

“I’m broken now,” Young pointed out. “That’s kind of the whole problem.”

She shook her head. Carefully, she replaced the glasses, but turned before he could see her expression. “I don’t think that’s your problem,” she said.

* * *

After Alaniz had gone, Young lay on the gurney and tried to understand what she had meant. But the pills were kicking in, which meant that some of the pain was ceding way to a thin, stretched, floating feeling. He found himself staring at the light fixtures, scrutinizing them for any color or shape that was familiar. It was hard for him to wrap his head around the idea that he could have been in this room and said things, done things, that weren’t a part of him any longer. It was like a separate version of him had existed, just for a few hours, and then it had sat up and detached itself from him, leaving him to deal with what had happened while it was in charge of his body. He wondered if it was still here. The him who had gotten the tel’tak flying when he and David had crested the caldera after crashing their stolen Lucian shuttle, who must’ve gotten that first glimpse of the panoply of stars that meant, against all odds, they were going to live.

What would he ask that other self? Maybe whether it knew anything he didn’t, any tricks to get him out of the mess he was in. Maybe it had some kind of skill he’d lost. It’d walked away with a confidence he felt sure he must have had once, a certainty that he was building something lasting, that what seemed like scattered bricks and buckets of mortar now would someday cohere, like all things cohered, going from chaos to reason, turning into a narrative that made sense.

Rush would probably tell him that was shitty science, or something.

He had a feeling the way Rush thought about things was different.

If he could just manage to get Rush back—

His thoughts were interrupted by someone clearing their throat.

He glanced over and saw Jackson, slouching with his hands in his pockets.

“The, uh, the tide’s going down,” Jackson said, just a little bit awkward in a way that surely had to be affected. “I heard Alaniz cleared you. Mitchell’s not too happy.”

Young’s mouth twisted. “Yeah, well, when is he ever.”

“He gets protective.”

“Maybe he should get a dog.”

“God, no. With the kind of lives we lead?” Jackson turned a wryly astonished look at Young.

“He could get a dogsitter.”

“See, I meant he’d choose the dog over us and retire. I’m not ready to break in a new head of SG-1 again.”

Young huffed out a laugh. “I don’t think anybody at the SGC’s really in the retiring business.”

Jackson’s smile faded slightly. He bent his head; he had pulled his hands out of his pocket and was pretending to inspect a piece of loose thread. “So you’re still in it for the long haul. In spite of everything.”

Young took a second to respond. “That’s a very ambiguous fucking question,” he said at last. “And it’s been a long day.”

“Dr. Jackson?” someone said on Jackson’s radio.

Jackson pulled an apologetic face. “About to get longer,” he said, and pulled the radio out. “Yeah, go ahead?”

“Colonel Mitchell asked me to tell you that scanners are detecting two life signs on the planet’s surface. We’re preparing to send down a team.”

Jackson drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. His eyes flicked up to Young. “—We’ll be right there,” he said.

* * *

Still, Young didn’t know what to expect— _still_ , even with that objective fact as reassurance, the flicker on the scanners, _two life signs_ , he couldn’t trust in any outcome, or he couldn’t imagine a kind of resolution that came without a note of defeat. He found himself holding his breath as they beamed down, then squinting out over the alien landscape: the dark now fully settled onto the eerie beachfront, the cliffs lit bone-white by light where the too-bright moons had risen into the sky.

The tide had receded to the point that it was sloshing sulkily over the base of the gate, occasionally sending waves crashing over the iridescent skeleton that had been the DHD. It seemed threatening still, a force that could at any moment rise up and overwhelm the land mass, drowning the gate and DHD and anything else in its path, like maybe it had done to whatever sea creatures were printed in rocks by the cliffside, before they had a chance to run.

The team the _Odyssey_ had beamed down was ankle-deep in water upon their arrival, but it was easy to ignore that in the face of the two dark forms lying motionless in the surf.

More-or-less motionless— as Young stumbled towards them, running-without-running in the shallow water, he saw the taller figure cough and retch and try feebly to claw itself further up the beach. He reached it; saw Sheppard’s boyish face, looking white and half-dead under the plastered-down spikes of his hair.

Sheppard squinted at Young with heavy, semi-conscious eyes. For some reason he was half-naked under a camo jacket, the sea blurring away the edge of a web of black ink-marks on his upper chest. “Are you— “ he managed to get out, and coughed up more water. “—Real?”

“Yeah,” Young said. He was kneeling in spite of seizures of pain in his lower body and turning the other body on its back, his hands seeming to work independent of himself. “Yeah, I’m real; this is real; you’re back with us.”

And it was Rush, of course, that other body: small, cold, stripped down to a t-shirt, mostly-drowned, and looking like he’d been in a bar fight, but breathing; breathing. Young pressed his cheek to Rush’s mouth to make sure, and felt the warm damp exhale against the skin of his face— felt it and was so grateful, so inexplicably grateful, that for a second he just stayed like that and let Rush breathe against him.

“Rush,” Sheppard said, not very coherently.

“He’s alive,” Young said, and let himself believe it at last. “He’s here.”

Jackson and Mitchell had arrived, slightly breathless. Jackson dropped to his knees beside Sheppard. “Did he get the glyph?” he asked Sheppard urgently. “Did he solve the cipher?”

“He—” Alaniz had gotten there also, and was trying to check Sheppard over with her med kit, but Sheppard wasn’t having it. He flailed a clumsy arm in Young’s direction, finally managing to seize Young’s wrist. “His hand,” Sheppard said. His eyes were fully open now, burning in his ghostly face. “Is his hand— he said it hurt— it was—“

“Stay still,” Alaniz said. Then, to Mitchell and Jackson: “We need to evac them. They’re freezing, borderline hypothermic. Are we going to be able to use the gate?”

“We can try,” Mitchell said skeptically, gesturing at the DHD-that-wasn’t-a-DHD. “We’ll send a probe through and see if it makes it.”

Young was trying to figure out what Sheppard had meant. He looked at Rush’s hands lying limp on the wet and slightly translucent sand. Rush wasn’t holding anything, and he didn’t seem injured, so what—

But when he lifted Rush’s right hand out of the water, gently uncurling the fingers that had formed a half-fist, he saw that neither of those statements was really strictly true. Rush was sort of injured, and sort of holding something. Across his palm, in thin, raised, silvery lines that seemed almost, but not quite, like the scar of an old brand, was the unmistakeable shape of a constellation glyph.

“Holy shit,” Mitchell said under his breath.

Jackson had closed his eyes, looking like he was in pain.

“We need to keep him off the ship,” Young said grimly. “If we can. Cam, go dial the gate and see if you can raise Landry.”

Mitchell eyed him like he was going to kick up some dust about it, maybe point out that Young was technically sidelined, which left Mitchell in sole command. But after a second he said tersely, “Yeah,” and went to do it.

“Colonel Sheppard,” Alaniz was saying. “Can you tell me what happened?”

But Sheppard was out-of-it again, drifting. His dark eyelashes had sunk closed.

Young heard the gate fire up behind him. The wormhole cast shadows on the water, or not shadows, but the opposite of shadows: wavering patches of bluish silvery light. They were on Rush’s face, too, making him look unearthly: a never-seen-before sea creature washed out of the depths.

And then, unexpectedly, Rush opened his eyes. He didn’t seem to be seeing Young at first, or much of anything, really. After a moment, his eyes focused a little more.

He frowned up at Young’s face. “So it _is_ you,” he said vaguely. “I could hear you in the dark.”

Young laughed. It made his chest hurt. “Is that supposed to be an insult?” he asked. He was still holding onto Rush’s hand very tightly.

“Noisy,” Rush said, sounding dissatisfied. His eyes slid shut again.

“Hey, can you stay with me?” Young said. He gave Rush’s shoulder a very gentle shake, trying to draw his attention.

Rush made a little _mmph_ of displeasure and blinked at Young, drawing his eyebrows together in a slow, troubled look. “I don’t know,” he said blurrily.

There was something in his tone that made Young uneasy, something that hinted they might not be talking about the same subject. “Well, try,” Young said. “Okay? We’re going to medevac you through the gate any minute.”

Rush sighed heavily in a way that communicated extreme put-upon-ness. “Oh, all right,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll try.”

But he didn’t try very hard, because a minute later he was out cold again, and he was still limp and unresisting when Mitchell came to lift him up and set him on a stretcher that the _Odyssey_ had beamed down.

Alaniz, silently and without having been asked to, offered Young both hands so he could lever himself to his feet. He almost lurched into her and knocked her over, abruptly dizzy from the pills he’d taken and still in pretty serious pain.

She steadied him and helped him limp towards the gate, where the wide coin of the wormhole was waiting.

“So,” she said as they splashed through the inch or so of seawater. “That’s the guy, huh? The one everyone’s fighting over? The future of the galaxy, or whatever? I gotta say, I was expecting someone taller.”

Ahead of them, Mitchell and James took Rush through the gate. Rush’s hand had slipped off of the stretcher, the right hand, and Young could see the faint hint of the constellation glyph in the darkness, gleaming against Rush’s palm. He didn’t want Rush’s fingers trailing in the water; the sea was cold. He wanted to pick that hand up and place it carefully against Rush’s chest. He thought that it was not the response he should have had, probably, not the response of the Icarus Project's acting head, and for a moment he felt unsteady in a way that had nothing to do with his back or hip or leg. He had to stop and take a deep breath, try to remember the map of the world he was supposed to be following.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s the guy.”


	22. Chapter 22

A long tone that was slightly flatter than F#4                                                                           ( _interrogatio)_  
but perhaps they tuned differently, of course yes                                                                     ( _interrogatio)_  
they tuned differently, they would certainly tune                                                                      ( _desideratos: envuenie_ceristor.waledos_ )  
differently, and so perhaps he could accept it                                                                           ( _scioscents…)_  
as F#4, F#4, F#4, and so perhaps the next was                                                                         ( _scioscents…)_  
A4 and when he heard that, he could anticipate                                                                        ( _scioscents…_ )  
the note that was coming, but it did not sound                                                                         ( _eitema: revuenie_ceristor_ )  
_right_ , it would not _settle_ , and when the note did                                                                       ( _eitema: suncompile_sustemad)_  
not sound right then you were supposed to                                                                              ( _scioscents…_ )  
tune the instrument but in this case the note                                                                            ( _scioscents…_ )  
did not sound right and so the instrument                                                                                ( _scioscents…_ )  
wanted to tune _him_ —

He did not want to be tuned.  
Or did he?

His mind was made of boxwood.

 _Here is the bird that never flew._  
_Here is the tree that never grew._  
_Here is the bell that never rang._  
_Here is the fish that never swam._

But the bell was ringing.

It has been suggested that jellyfish swim faster when the bell is driven at its resonant frequency.

The whole universe was a star-choked and unspeaking craw  
and he reached his hand into it like a child who was still learning—

The smell of phosphorus. 

_Crudelistas machinam asthentientem creare est._

Nonlinear effects were observed for larger deformations,  
shifting the optimal frequency to higher than the resonant frequency.

It seemed cruel that the universe would sing on an E flat  
but out of tune, as though God had a tin ear.

But it _sang._

No, the _note_ was there but not the _bell_ , which _had been rung_  
or was _not yet ringing—_

“Dr. Rush?”

There were processes that required initiation, completion, termination.

But they were not his processes.

But they had been.

In the sense that he had once been a part of the things to which they belonged, or they had once been a part of him.

They had not wanted to let him go, those things. They had not wanted to be alone. They had wanted to– _eat you up_ , someone said in the back of his brain. Had they let him go?

“Are you awake?”

Something was not— quite— _right_ with his body.

Something had changed.

Possibly it had been changing for some time.

A spectrum.

Rush blinked.

Red hair.

A girl with red hair and hawk-eyes holding a battered black paperback with a dinosaur on the cover of it. She was handcuffed to a chair and that seemed a peculiar way to go about the act of reading. But then he remembered who she was. The girl. Ginn. _Life finds a way._

“Dr. Rush?” she asked again, uncertainly.

“Aye,” he said, and then reconsidered the response. It had come out of his mouth unbidden. But he was not meant to talk like that. “Yes,” he said instead.

He tried to push himself to his elbows and was unable to do it. His voice was rough and his body hurt. He felt weak. Where was he? —In a bed. On a bed. The infirmary. Blurry overhead lights. A memory of papers spilling.

“You _are_ awake. Are you well?” Ginn asked. Her eyes were very large in a way that connoted worry, though he didn’t know what he had done to earn that from her. Or why she would be reading mass-market paperbacks at his bedside, unless he were on the brink of death.

Was he on the brink of death? He didn’t think so.

“Why are you here?” he asked blurrily, frowning at her.

“You didn’t arrive to teach me. I knew something was wrong. No one would tell me where you were. I broke the television. Daniel Jackson said that you’d been injured, and that I could stay here until you woke up.”

This seemed to Rush to be a very confusing narrative of events. “You broke a _television?_ ” he said. He lifted his arm, which had an IV in it, and made a face at the tubing.

“Please don’t move around so much,” Ginn said, sounding fretful. She bent down and set her book on the floor. “You have been unconscious, even though there was no reason for you to be unconscious. The medical overseer could not provide an adequate explanation. Colonel Young lost his temper with her.”

Young. Rush started to ask where Young was, and then realised there was no need to. Young was on the opposite side of the infirmary, asleep in a chair. His head was tilted back, his mouth agape in a manner that made him look idiotic. It caused an intolerable surge of warmth to run through Rush.

Ginn followed his gaze. “He was very concerned about you,” she said.

“Well, I’m fine,” Rush said shortly, and tried again to push himself up to his elbows. This time he succeeded.

“You are _not_ ,” Ginn said.

“What time is it?”

“ _Please_ do not get up. You are _not_ fine.”

Rush started to rub at his eyes with one hand, winced, and stopped— perplexed by encountering the edge of a small bandage, and by the unexpected pain.

“—Your nose is broken,” Ginn said, which explained these incidences. “You look terrible.”

He had known that his nose was broken, though. Hadn’t he?

Sheppard, he thought.

A cascade of memory pounded over him. The glyph. The glyph; he had gotten it; the glyph, the _glyph_ , and it had hurt but it had been worth it because he had broken the code and he had _won_. It was still there, on his palm. It was real, the glyph, so that resolved one of his questions. But how much of the rest had been real? The fountain. The courtyard. Like Andalucia. Andalucia, when will I see you? When it is snowing out again. It hadn’t been snowing. But it had been white in the city. The hungry city. It was a church, and it had come to claim him with its iron drum. No. That was another song lyric. But accurate nevertheless. It had put its mark on his body. He had kept dying. He had kissed Sheppard. I have nothing, he had said. Nothing that is holding me back. And he had proved it was true. But still died. The doors had spoken in tongues. Not in tongues, but in tones that Sheppard was incapable of hearing. The whole non-earth had turned noisy, but it had wanted to be understood as signal. It had touched him with particulate fingers, and he had oscillated in sympathy with it. But still he had been imperfectly tuned. He had broken the radio, and God, God, he did not want to think about this; he had hit it and he had scrabbled out his square inch of Oxford and he had smashed everything he’d ever put his hands on, which was what they wanted and what they expected, the only way to prove it was his, and Sheppard had said you don’t have to _attack_ everything, but then there had been something that Sheppard had wanted him to break or break off, and he was not sure if it had been broken, if it could be broken, and most things could be broken if you really put the fucking boot to them, but how did you know if they were the right things to break? _Something_ always had to be broken. In his experience. In the end. I would have had to, Sheppard had said— I would have had to—

He put his fist to his forehead, feeling overwhelmed and bewildered. “Sheppard,” he said. “Where is Sheppard?”

“We had to wake him up a while back,” Young’s rusty voice said. “There was some kind of emergency in Atlantis.”

Rush looked and saw that Young was awake, or at least in the process of awaking. He looked as though, since the last time Rush had seen him, he’d been yoked to a vast and invisible weight that he was braced against even in the act of sitting. He looked, as Ginn had said of Rush himself, terrible. Not like he had looked in the hallucination, or whatever it had been, that not-real place where he had looked—

He had looked—

Not terrible.

Here his face was lined with pain.

He seemed to be executing upon Rush the same intensity of critical inspection, and coming to roughly the same conclusions, which Rush resented. “She’s right,” Young said.

“About what?” Rush retorted, trying to conceal his destabilisation. “Destroying a television?”

Young’s mouth quirked. “You told him about that?” he said to Ginn, who had folded her knees up into the chair and was eyeing him with scepticism. Then, to Rush: “I meant about you looking terrible, but, yeah, turns out Lucian Alliance here has a violent streak. Who knew, right? Trashed her cell, almost got herself locked down for good.”

Rush looked at Ginn. She was staring down at her hands in her lap. He said, uncomprehending, “Because I wasn’t available to teach you number theory?”

She darted a glance at him and went back to glowering at her hands. “I don’t trust the others,” she said, which failed to really answer his question. She jerked her head at Young. “Not even him. The security of their organisation is compromised. _You_ should not trust them.”

Young rolled his eyes. “Listen. Get back to me when _your_ organisation isn’t founded on _torture_ and a protection racket that would put the Corleone family to shame!”

“I don’t understand you,” Ginn said, sounding slightly sullen. “I have no organisation any longer. And your rhetorical strategy is flawed.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Young tried to rise from his chair— a simple action that he was unable to complete. His breath caught and scraped in his throat; he seized the nearest gurney with a sound of pain, and had to grope for one of a set of forearm crutches that was, Rush saw, leant against the side of the gurney.

“What the fuck happened to you, then?” Rush asked.

He did not know what the tone of his own voice was. He did not know what to make out of the neuronal impulses that were causing his chest to tighten at the sight of Young’s struggle to conceal that he was suffering. He felt a strong desire to hurl something across the room, as though it might be possible to expel this strange energy from his body by transferring it to a proximate object. But no appropriate candidates for such a gesture presented themselves.

Young had managed to make his way upright. He crossed the room, leaning on the crutches, and stopped at Rush’s bedside. “Nothing,” he said. “What the fuck happened to _you?_ ”

“Nothing,” Rush said.

Young sighed and closed his eyes. “Hotshot—“

“Don’t call me that.”

“How’d your nose get broken?” Young asked him point-blank.

Rush looked away and folded his arms belligerently across his chest. “Didn’t Sheppard tell you?”

“I’m asking you to tell me.”

“I endorse Sheppard’s account.”

They stared at one another with a certain degree of antagonism.

In a turn of events that could not properly be called a _turn_ , as it was profoundly unsurprising and therefore more of a plodding progression, Young broke first. He sighed again and directed his gaze at Ginn. “Hey, kid,” he said. “You think you could give us a minute?”

She gave him a flat look and raised the hand that was shackled to the chair.

“Right.” Young stumped over in her direction. “Let me just— you’re good to go, right? You’re not gonna bust up another television?”

Ginn shrugged without much energy.

Young seemed to take this as a yes. He fetched some other species of goon, a large and uniformly flaxen-coloured man in patchy camouflage, from outside the infirmary door to uncuff her.

Rush found it unnerving— the revelation that the room he was in was being guarded, much less that it was being guarded by this particular specimen of armed and blank-faced boy-soldier. He tracked the man’s movements, feeling as though he, not Ginn, were the cuffed one. He was suddenly aware that he was wearing a hospital gown— that someone, between his last uneasy tremors of awareness and now, had undressed him. He didn’t like it.

The whole-grain soldier started to lead Ginn out of the room. But at the last moment she turned and escaped his escort, making her rapid way back to Rush’s side.

“I _am_ going to bust up another television,” she said fiercely, “if you are not available to teach me number theory.”

Rush frowned at her, perplexed and a little startled. He could not readily understand or recognise the emotion, or the intensity of emotion, she had put into the threat. He said, “They’ll only buy a new one, you know.”

“Then I will continue breaking televisions.” Ginn lifted her chin. “For as long as it remains a viable means of communicating my resistance to the current state of affairs.”

“Yes, well," Rush said. "I strongly encourage any actions likely to result in inconvenience for the American military as a whole. However, I’m certain I’ll be more than capable of coming to tutor you tomorrow.”

“Nope,” Young said from where he was pretending to inspect his fingernails on the other side of the bed.

Rush glared at him.

Young returned a placid look.

“Later this week,” Rush amended, without bothering to conceal his resentment.

“Good,” Ginn said. “That is good.”

She smiled abruptly, a quick, bright, and unexpected expression, not altogether certain of itself. Then she turned and submitted herself to the looming oversight of the guard who, casting a wary and uninterpretable look at Rush, steered her out of the room.

When the door had closed behind them, Rush found himself suddenly more conscious of Young’s presence, as though it had expanded now that they were alone, become radiant somehow and filled the infirmary. He meant it literally, _radiant_ ; Young was no sunrise, but he emitted something that simultaneously warmed and disturbed.

Rush looked away from him but could not ignore him.

Young slowly lowered himself into Ginn’s vacated chair. “So,” he said.

“So,” Rush repeated flatly.

“Sheppard wanted me to give you a note.”

Rush did not react to this information. “Is he all right?” he asked after a moment. “Sheppard?”

He would have liked for Sheppard to be here. In Sheppard’s absence, it was all too easy to believe that none of it had been real. Or perhaps impossible to sort the real from the unreal. _A spectrum_ , Sheppard had called it, but that did not sit well with Rush. A spectrum felt uneasy, changeable and elusive, a dark and frozen sea upon which it would take considerable skill to skate, one’s whole bodyweight staying stable on a razor-blade of balance, but only so long as you didn’t stop and think of the miles of ocean underneath you.

He curled his right hand into a fist.

The glyph had been real.

‘Yeah, he’s fine,” Young said. He was fishing in his uniform pocket. He came up with a crumpled, folded piece of paper, which he passed over to Rush. “He was kind of in a hurry. But he had quite a story to tell us.”

Rush opted to ignore the prompt implicit in Young’s latter statement, and unfolded the piece of paper. It was half of a white sheet stamped _CLASSIFIED_ in grey block capitals. Sheppard had scribbled on it in what looked like ballpoint pen— a haphazard drawing that he had captioned in a strange approximation of blocky Ancient letters. Rush wondered if the current residents of Atlantis had produced their own de facto handwritten script. The idea was pleasing, like a seed found in an Egyptian tomb being planted and managing, after thousands of years, to bear fruit. But it seemed as likely that Sheppard was the only one to whom it would occur to write in Ancient, and this idea made Rush rather sad.

It reminded him of the Ancient city’s voices that were not quite voices, which he found unsettling.

The message began with a nonsensical string of letters and numbers, which was apparently some kind of authorisation code, judging by the cartoonish drawing of a computer with an arrow pointing to it. Another arrow led from the computer to what looked like a snowflake, but was almost certainly an inept rendering of the Atlantis emblem. The snowflake was pointing to a smiling face with spikes for hair, which contrasted sharply with the scowling, bespectacled face hovering above the cartoon computer.

“Oh, hey,” Young said, shamelessly spying over Rush’s shoulder. “Look, that’s you.”

Rush snatched the note away irritably. “Do you _mind?_ ”

“What does it say?”

“It says that _my_ business and _your_ business are regions without any overlapping features.”

“I really doubt that’s what it says.” Young was leaning too close to Rush, close enough that Rush could feel the heat from his breath, his shoulder, his upper arm. This was a quite real and hence unbearable experience of radiation, the energy generated within Young’s body leaking out and exciting the atoms of Rush’s skin.

Rush’s instinct was to effect Young’s removal, as swiftly and as sharply as possible, so that he would no longer be faced with the unendurable tension that was created by Young’s nearness to him: the need to move and to not-move, neither of which was an acceptable course of action, the impulse towards violence and towards the opposite of violence, which he could not at once identify. Impulses raced and repelled one another and cycloned. They could not resolve. Rush felt locked within his physical existence, a bedraggled bird in a miserable electromagnetic cage.

“It says—“ he forced out, contriving to escape the situation. “ _In case you get shut out and want to give the other thing a whirl._ Which I’m sure he thinks is extremely clever. He told me to put out or get shut out, you see.”

_“What?”_

And, all right, that had had an effect; Young lurched back, and the warmth was gone. But this transpired to not be what Rush had wanted, though of course it was exactly what he had wanted. The paradox continued, making him agitated and ill-at-ease.

“To provide context,” he said, not having another strategy and therefore opting to double down on his original efforts and affect an offhandedness he did not feel, “he was understandably somewhat annoyed at the time, having been abandoned midway through the process of my tearing his clothes off. I suppose I wasn’t meant to tell you that; I can see why he left it out of his debriefing. Though— all things considered— you can hardly sell him down the river.”

Young was silent for a moment. His jaw worked. His face was expressing an emotion that Rush could not decipher. “Oh,” he said at last.

"Oh?"

“Yeah."

Rush regarded him, feigning enquiry.

"I mean, of course— I wouldn’t. Say anything.”

Another lag.

“I didn’t know that you—“ Young said, and made another face, equally stupid and indecipherable. “But Sheppard, I mean— he’s a good guy. A little weird, but— and, I mean, he was obviously—“ He stalled once more.

“He was obviously what?” Rush prompted.

Young rallied. “I mean, he was worried about you—“

“Was he,” Rush said.

“So—“

Young was on the wrong foot, which was again what Rush had wanted. But all at once Rush couldn’t bear his fumbling, maladroit confusion, his feeble attempts at reassurance, his stupid, friendly face and the hard-to-label color of his eyes. Tormenting him was meant to be fun, but it had begun to feel like pricking a balloon with a needle. “Christ, fuck off, won't you,” he said exhaustedly. “We’d died about eleven times by that point. You’d be desperate to do something or _someone_ else, too. And, at any rate, we— didn’t.”

“Oh,” Young said again. “So you don’t—?”

Rush shrugged jerkily. He looked down. “Can we talk about something else, please?”

Young was still looking flummoxed. “Yeah. Yeah, of course.”

But he did not immediately manage to offer up a new topic, and so they sat in silence.

Rush’s body was remembering that it was meant to hurt. He was tired beyond all reason, more tired than he had thought it possible for a human being to be. He assumed that he was a human being. He didn’t know what, if any, were the other options. He drew his knees up to his chest, deforming the hospital blankets. He hated that he was not wearing clothes. He felt as though someone had cracked him open and reached inside and rearranged him. They had left his emotions too near the surface. He did not know how he could be expected to interface with the world like this.

“I suppose you’re here to debrief me, really,” he said to Young, without looking at him. “I’ll save you the time: I broke the code, I got the glyph.”

“I know,” Young said. “Sheppard told us.”

Rush could _feel_ Young looking at his hand. He closed it into a fist and folded his right arm against himself. “Of course he did. Company man, Sheppard. A _good guy_ , even if he is a _little weird_.” He was aware that he was being unreasonable. “I’m sure he gied you a full and thorough accounting. I seen the look on that guard’s face; he wasn’t here for Ginn, was he? I’m surprised I didn’t wake up shackled to the fucking scratcher; were you all out of cuffs by that point or— _fuck_. Fuck.”

It was unreasonable again, the anger that surged up in him at the realisation that he had slipped without conscious awareness into the sound and speech of Glasgow, something that was synonymous to him with rage and weariness. It fed itself, that weariness, that rage; he bit down hard on his lip to stop himself saying something that would be more humiliating still.

“Hey,” Young said quietly.

Rush made an inarticulate sound and then, because he had been left with few other means of communicating his inability to tolerate the current state of affairs, he yanked the IV needle out of his left arm and pressed his thumb down on the pinprick’s-worth of blood that welled up.

“Whoa, whoa,” Young said, coming in on cue, like a very doleful, reliable, and faintly alarmed double bass. “What the hell are you doing? You’re supposed to let a doctor do that!”

But there was no doctor in the room, and it had been unbearable for Rush to remain tied to the IV stand for a moment longer.

He lifted his thumb and stared at the smear of blood on it, numbly.

“Are you okay?” Young said. “Let me see.” He lumbered out of his chair and seized Rush’s arm, as though it was so easy to touch another person, something he assumed his body was made to do and that he had never had cause to question. “You could open a vein like that.” His fingertip marked out a point close to the surface where the blue stroke of such a vein ran.

“I’m _fine_ ,” Rush said, and prised himself savagely away from Young’s hand. “Don’t touch me.” He was breathing hard for no reason. He could not bear to have Young mapping out his vital structures. He could not bear to be possessed of vital structures. How asinine, how risible, how fucking absurd to be a person, he thought, and what a comparative relief to be almost anything else, perhaps a jellyfish, possessed of a distributed nervous system, or even perhaps a siphonophore, colonial and never one thing or the other, so that you could take it apart and there would still be an it, and no person could come along and say, _Here, here is where I could hurt you_ , because there was no _you_ to hurt, there was no _it_ to be irradiated by another person’s presence and left warm, weak, mutated maybe, exposed, exposed, _exposed_ , but he was exposed anyway, wasn’t he, down to the chromosomal level, every part of him unpacked down to the individual letters, which he could not think of because he could not _stand_ the idea of—

He dropped his head and raked his hair back, clenching his hands in it tightly. “Could you—“ he said, and swallowed. His voice was less steady than he had wanted. “Could you get me out of here, do you think?”

Something in Young’s face flinched at the question. He looked away abruptly, then smiled in a way that was inexplicably painful and lowered his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. That’s the plan.”

* * *

Neither of them was fit to drive, really, but Young made the case that he had not spent most of the last six hours unconscious for no medically detectable reason, and therefore— when Rush had dressed and been subjected to a final round of medical examination— possessed the more legitimate claim to the car keys.

Rush, who felt as though he’d run a marathon whilst being beaten about the head and neck, didn’t protest overmuch. He’d nearly fallen asleep in the lift on the way up to the surface, and then snapped back to himself with a ringing in his ears that he could not entirely source to the creak of machinery working.

But Young was more badly injured than Rush had assumed. Even with the crutches, he moved with a stiff and hesitant lurching that spoke of damage to the muscles of the lower back.

He caught Rush looking at him as they crossed the Level One underground car park in the disorientatingly hourless light of the sodium lamps, and his face tightened. “I can drive,” he said in a hard, flat voice.

“As though anything you do in that monstrosity of an automobile could be called _driving_ ,” Rush returned, the insult coming to him without effort.

“At least I can trust myself to drive on the right side of the road.”

“I do have an American driving license, you know. I’m very fucking flexible.”

“No kidding,” Young said under his breath as they reached the car.

This remark shut Rush up for the length of time that it took him to negotiate the door handle, which was an unexpectedly strenuous procedure. When he had opened the door and collapsed into the passenger seat, out of breath, he said, “Was that intended to be a innuendo?”

“No,” Young said, the disingenuous bastard. Looking guilty, he started the car.

“Because—“

“It wasn’t.”

Rush’s mouth turned down. “What the fuck did you do to yourself?” he asked, in retaliation.

Young steered the truck out of the Mountain. It was night outside, which as disorientating as the car park. “Went swimming,” he said. “To retrieve a computer.”

Rush rested his head against the window. The sparsely populated eastern edge of the city passed outside, offering an undifferentiated mass of dark. “That sounds preposterously and therefore predictably idiotic.”

“It was your computer.”

“And yet my evaluation stands. Is it really three AM?” The clock on the dash was flashing electric green numbers.

Young glanced at it. “Yeah."

"Of the same day? Or—"

"Same day," Young confirmed. "Well, next day, technically."

This seemed difficult to accept. Rush briefly closed his eyes.

Young directed an unreadable look at him in the darkness. "You gate-lagged?” 

“Mm.” Rush could contextually extrapolate the meaning of the term, but had an uneasy sense that it might not be the correct one. His gaze wandered to the faint haze of stars above the trees. He thought it unlikely that he could see any stars that mattered; they were too distant. Whatever white sun had touched the bereft and elegant reliquiae of the Ancient city was in a galaxy so far distant from his own that its light would not reach here. Still he felt he knew its shape, or perhaps the dark shape of the planet, invisible in the sky yet possessed of a mass that exerted a powerful gravity upon him. He could have charted it, he was sure, from anywhere in the entirety of the cosmos. Spacetime did not warp between them but neither did it make sense. Something there was that didn’t love the laws of physics. It was kicking little holes in their wall to get to him.

“Go to sleep,” Young said.

“Why? So you can interrogate me later?”

Young sighed and didn’t say anything.

“I’m right, aren’t I,” Rush said to the window.

Outside, the dark was giving way to the speckled lights of residential streets. Young drummed his fingers restlessly against the steering wheel. “I have to debrief you,” he said. “It’s not the same thing.”

“No?”

“ _No_. I just want you to tell me what happened.”

Rush slouched down in his seat. “I told you what happened,” he said. “I cracked the code. I got the glyph.”

Young sighed again. “Just go to sleep, okay?”

Rush had no such intention. But the car was a warm humming shell, and Young a breathing machine whose demonstrable function eased him, and so, in a matter of moments, he did.

* * *

The notes wouldn't settle but they did progress, from something that hovers between a D4 and a D#4 to a little more than E-flat, and then climbing to the flat F#4, sharp A4 and then stretching out to touch another flat D# again, D#5 this time, the next octave, approaching that tortuous not-quite-E flat—

There were names for these notes but he did not know them.

There were names for these notes and there was a pattern and if he had not known it then they could not have crossed the bridge in the dark where Sheppard had said _What are you listening to_ as though he could not hear the way that each panel of glass voiced itself like a concupiscent bell, caressing him with the shivery chords of microtonal vibrations, asking him to decide how next followed on next, and he had _known_ as he knew the steps and half-steps of a diatonic scale, so automatic that he could not recall a time he had not known them.

 _—You would have been a dreadful student, Gloria had said. I know your sort; you skip the theory because you can fumble through by ear. You hardly know what a key is, but you can transpose anything if I give you a starting note. I hate you, you know; it’s like it’s in your blood. I’ve had to work for it._  
_—Do you really hate me? he’d said idly, sprawled across the bed and watching her dress for a recital, pinning up the disorderly bulk of her wheat-chaff hair._  
_—Yes; I regard you with utter scorn and despisal. I only keep you around as a sort of human pitch pipe._  
_—_ Am _I a human pitch pipe?_  
_—You are; it’s terribly unfair._ _She crossed the room, hair only half-secured, for the apparent purpose of looking fondly at him. Can I have a concert A?_  
_—Why?_  
_—Because I like to hear you sing it._  
_—I thought you hated me._  
_She leaned over him, the stray loose ends of hair brushing softly against his face. —I take it back, she said. I love you in the key of A._  
_—And what about A-flat?_  
_—That too._  
_—And what about A-flat minor?_  
_—Are we going to go through all the keys?_  
_—You know how I am. I like to be thorough._  
_—Well, she said, all right, then. And she kissed his forehead like a benediction, which he loved, and he hummed the exact pitch of a concert A._

Not concert A.  
This had its foundation somewhere different.  
It wanted him to—

        Dx4  
__ xE4  
xF#4  
Ax4  
not-quite-Eflat5  
Axx4  
Ax4  
xF#4

It wanted him—

Dx4  
xE4  
xF#4  
Ax4  
not-quite-Eflat5  
Eflat5  
not-quite-Eflat5  
Axx4  
not-quite-Eflat5  
Eflat5  
Fxx5  
Eflat5  
not-quite-Eflat5—

“Rush.”

He lurched forward abruptly, breathing as though he had been running. He was not poised on the icy and chime-like ledge of that crystalline sub-E; he was not turning uneasily like a taut and fragile string on a peg; but for a moment he did not know _where_ or _what_ he was and he fought, panicky, against the sense of being imprisoned, his heart pounding, until Young caught his flailing arm with a calm and heavy hand, and he remembered that Young was Young and he was Rush and they were enclosed in a vehicle together on the frail and violable hellscape that was the Earth.

“Easy,” Young said.

Rush managed to fight his way loose of the restraint of the seatbelt, and fling the door open, and stagger out into the open air.

They were in the car park of the apartment complex. The air was cold because it was autumn. It was night. To the left, on one of the artificial lawns, a sprinkler was making a sound like an amorous insect. It reminded Rush of the fountain in the courtyard, but he assumed it was real, though he didn’t know how he would establish the fact with any certainty.

His right hand itched where the glyph was etched into it, and there was no wedding ring on his left hand. 

He felt they were no longer parts of himself, those hands, but that was good, that was what he had wanted, to disassemble his body, to take apart all that he was, had been. That was the point. Wasn't it? 

Dematerialisation.

He hugged his shoulders, still trembling in the shock of the night air. 

Young had stumped around to the passenger side of the car on his stupid crutches and was looking at Rush. He kept looking for too long, intolerably sympathetic.

“Come on,” he said at last. “I’ve got leftovers in the fridge; we can heat ’em up.”

“I want to go home,” Rush said, although he did not want to go home, and furthermore did not conceptualise his flat in any such terms. There was no place he conceptualised in any such terms. That was what he was protesting. Had been protesting. The protest he was making. In case it needed to be said. To Young. To Sheppard. To anyone who might be listening, watching. 

“You need to eat something," Young said.

“No.”

Young sighed. “ _Yes_. Lam said so.”

“Did she? I don’t recall.”

“Food, water, and a muscle relaxant. You were _there_ when she said it; this was, like, forty minutes ago.”

“I wasn’t experiencing any particular interest in her instructions.”

“You realise that _personal interest_ is not usually the criterion people use decide whether to listen to doctors?”

“I may have been contemplating something more important.”

“—You’re eating,” Young said. He started heading towards the building, apparently possessed of a groundless faith that Rush was going to follow. “Plus,” he added over his shoulder, “this way we can knock the debriefing out. You’ll be in bed before you know it.”

Rush thought this was unlikely, as he did not own a bed. He imagined curling up on the bare floorboards of his flat, which was how he slept when he could not avoid sleeping, sometimes wadding up whatever blazer or button-down shirt he had been wearing to use as a makeshift pillow. Sometimes not.

He ached. His nose hurt where it had been broken. He was tired at such a bone-deep level that he suspected a part of his physical resources was being consumed by the act of fighting the city, or the memory of the city, or its ghost, its phantasm, whatever shape might be assigned to something that was real without— it was possible, even likely— being entirely real. He pictured himself as a comet forced into an orbit it had not chosen, streaming particles behind it. He had never before thought of a comet as tired.

Perhaps if he were a comet he would not _be_ tired. But he did not know how to be a comet at the moment. And so he followed Young towards the apartment building’s lifts, steered by helplessly uncomet-like instincts, without really knowing why.

* * *

Whilst Young heated up leftover miso black cod with parsnip cream and cabbage gelée, Rush wandered restlessly from point to point in the apartment. He thought that if he paused for a moment he would likely fall asleep where he was standing, which made moving a necessity, and he was driven too by an unshakable but disturbing need to touch solid objects in the world. Sofa, barstool, television, coffee table. Their texture underneath his fingers confirmed their materiality. Uneven plaster on the wall. Real, real, real.

“You realise it’s wearing me out just watching you,” Young said, setting two plates on the kitchen island.

“As though you aren’t an ongoing advertisement for the frangibility of the human body.”

Young’s face tightened. “I don’t know what that word means,” he said, “but I can guess. Eat your goddamn food, would you?”

Rush, feeling more than a little frangible himself, perched on a barstool and did so.

When Young, unusually, showed no sign of inflicting conversation upon him, he said, “Am I allowed to enquire as to which bones you broke this time? Even you must realise that there exists a limit beyond which they’re not a renewable resource. Why on earth would that general send you through the stargate in the first place? He must—“

“We can do my debriefing tomorrow,” Young cut him off shortly. “This one’s yours.”

Dissatisfied and unsettled by the response, Rush picked at what was left of his cod. “How foolish of me to hope that ours was a relationship of mutual interrogation.”

“Can you just— quit the games and tell me what happened to you?” Young had stopped eating, and dropped his chin into the cup of his hand. He looked tired, more tired than Rush was, possibly. Rush remembered the way he had slept in the infirmary: open-mouthed and exhausted, with his head tipped back. Presumably some doctor had given him the crutches. Had whoever-it-was also taken into account his pain, his weariness, the shadow of darkness that seemed to dog him, visible at the undersides of his eyes? Rush, who did not tolerate incompetence, wanted to take him back to the infirmary and say: I have a complaint to make; he isn’t functioning properly; look at him; do your fucking job.

Instead he placed his fork against the edge of his plate and silently held his hand up, displaying the silver, oddly raised symbol that cut across it like a scar. “I suspect,” he said, “that it may serve as a second factor for authentication. I say _it_ , but I suppose I mean— myself. In other words, my presence may be requisite for successful dialing. I don’t know yet.”

Young stood with some effort and made his way around the island to study the glyph more closely. He reached out as though to touch it, then stopped and glanced at Rush. “Can I…?” he asked.

Rush pressed his lips together and looked away. “I would’ve thought you’d’ve had the chance to do a full and thorough examination whilst I was unconscious and stuck with needles.”

“Yeah, but—“ Young made an uncomfortable gesture. “I guess I thought— you don’t really like it,” he said. “When people touch you. So—“

He didn’t finish his sentence.

Rush curled his fingers in, like he was testing a fist.

There was a difference, he thought, between touching someone and being touched; both were difficult, requiring so much calculation and coming with a system-crashing sensory load. Perhaps one had to be trained in it early, the art of being touched and touching— like language, which a human couldn’t learn unless it was introduced in childhood. There were no nouns and verbs and sentences to feral children; it was all a barrage of sound, structureless. It didn’t make sense. With touching, there had to be some habituation after which data became parseable. Automatically. Or else people would not do it. But it had always arrived as an onslaught of noise to him.

(Exception: the scent of her had preceded her, an aura of warmth that had promised,  _This is not going to hurt_ , or more likely,  _I am not going to hurt you_ , the only promise that one human being could make to another and the one least to be trusted, but he had trusted it with her, only her, right up until the end, when everything became so much more complicated, systems collapsing, edifices disassembling and decaying, life smashing to its sad constituent bricks—)

Touching— easier, since one controlled the parameters of input. I will put my hand into this fire only so far, and draw it out when I see fit. But being touched— the passive voice rendered one a victim. It signalled being subject to something you could not avoid: a superior force rubbing your face in your insufficiency, your smallness, your smart-but-not-so-smart-nowness, the sum total of everything about you not adding up to enough in the moment when there came an accounting. And once one had that knowledge, it could not be unknown.

So: no. He did not like— But he—

Gravity. Inertia. Velocity. Orbits. He wanted to be, but was not at the moment, comet-like.

Very carefully, he unfolded his fingers and held his hand out, palm-up, to Young.

He avoided Young’s eyes. So he felt only the touch of Young's fingers, broad thumbs brushing across the lines of the glyph. It was a sensation at once more intimate than he had expected and more ordinary: a matter-of-fact moment of contact that didn’t lend itself to metaphor. Let it be writ down in the book of the world, he thought, that on this date a man touched him. He held his breath. He didn’t recoil. He felt that Young was being careful, which was almost certainly offensive. After all, he wasn’t made of glass. It would have been easier if it hurt. It usually was. But it didn’t hurt.

The noise in his head did not increase, and instead gradually quietened.

Destructive interference. That was what it was called. But it did not feel destructive.

Young cleared his throat, after a interval that had run long. “How, um,” he said, and then cleared his throat again. “So how’d this, uh, happen?”

He was still holding Rush’s hand. He didn’t seem to have realised. 

Rush didn’t move. “There was a device,” he said. “A bit like a zero point module. It was necessary for myself and Colonel Sheppard to unlock it. When we did so, it revealed itself to contain an item in the shape of the glyph, which looked like glass but almost certainly wasn’t. I touched it, and the result was— as you see.”

“You just always gotta stick your hand in things, huh?” Young's mouth quirked. “And how’d your nose get broken?”

“Sheppard hit me.”

“Do I want to know why?”

Rush said, with as significant a quantity of careless disdain as he could summon, “I’m sure I don’t know.” But under Young’s sceptical eye, he relented. “It’s possible he was under an impression that I had intentionally drowned him— a misinterpretation of what was, in fact, a highly objective effort to increase our shared odds of survival.”

“A highly objective effort. I just bet it was.” There was worn-out amusement in Young’s voice. “Was this before or after you tore his clothes off?”

Rush lifted an arch eyebrow. “Oh, before. I suspect that Colonel Sheppard is too much of a gentleman to attack someone who’d kissed him.”

“Is that _why_ you kissed him?”

“You seem to have a very low opinion of me.” Rush was conscious of his hand, still held in Young’s two hands. “And a preoccupation with my activities vis-à-vis Colonel Sheppard.”

“I’m debriefing you,” Young said.

“Are you?”

“Mm-hm.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

The air in the apartment was warm and thin.

Rush swallowed thickly. “It doesn’t feel much like a debriefing,” he said.

“Doesn’t it?”

“No.”

The atmosphere stretched a moment longer, an unsustainable hush of a sphere in which they two alone were existing, one that might be shuddered to nonexistence by too harsh an indrawn breath.

And then Young did draw a breath and dropped Rush’s hand, his face altering. He stepped back. “Sorry,” he said— voice unsure of what to do with itself. “Right. Sorry. We should probably be talking about all the times you _died_. What was it, burning to death—“

“Heat exhaustion,” Rush corrected, thrown by the sudden transition.

Young continued talking over him. “—drowning, death by _noise_ —“

“It was probably, in fact, the consequent increase in air pressure that killed us.”

“—getting dropped into some kind of _death pit,_ and then you unlock a ZPM that _brands_ you, and— what? You just open a door and get to go home?”

So Sheppard hadn’t told them about the city.

Rush pictured Sheppard in the city of his own, the city that was husband and wife and both and neither, more and at the same time less. It will _eat you up_ , Sheppard had said, but he had wanted to go back. To stand in a city of spires on a silver ocean and offer to it what he could of himself, an imperfect communion between damaged and abandoned structures and the lonely stranger who had not been built for them.

“Yes,” he said, because he did not himself know how to describe such a city to someone for whom it would have been a thing that could not suffer. “We opened a door and got to go home.”

Young stared at him with an expression that said he knew he was being lied to, but was not sure about what, or what for.

Eventually, he shook his head and made his slow shuffling way back around the kitchen island. He sat, but he did not resume eating. “Sheppard said you heard something a couple of times,” he said. “Something that he couldn’t hear.”

“Yes, well.” Rush shrugged limply.

“That’s not really an answer.”

“Isn’t it? I’ve been labouring under a misapprehension.”

Young looked at him.

“—Music,” Rush said, making a gesture of defeat. He was too tired for circumlocution. “I could hear music. I’m trained for it; Sheppard isn’t. Perhaps I simply have a better ear.”

“You’re a musician?” Young asked. His face was curious, guarded. “You didn’t mention that.”

“Yes.”

“But you hate music.”

“Yes.” Rush looked down at his mostly-empty plate. “Yes.”

Young didn’t say anything for a long time. Rush could feel the weight of his gaze. When he spoke at last it was to say mildly, “You should take one of those pills Lam gave you, you know.”

“I dislike medication.”

“And you should get some sleep.”

“I dislike sleep as well.”

He did not want to enter his dark and empty flat. The way in which the walls and floorboards reflected sound waves would not cause those waves to destructively interfere with the incunabulate clamour that his body was playing host to. He could not be alone with it, he thought, not very coherently; not tonight; it was too large, and he was ripped at the seams and so tired. It would eat him up, but unlike Sheppard he did not know for certain that its source was something outside of his body, and if its source was not something outside of his body then he would eat himself up, and what would be left? There was nothing survivable in him. Nothing that had the instinct to persevere.

Young was still studying him. “Maybe you should stay here tonight,” he said slowly. “You look kind of—”

“I’m not going to resume sleeping on your couch like some sort of urchin,” Rush bit out, somewhat wearily.

“Well—“ Young hesitated. He took a breath and placed his hands on the kitchen island’s counter. It was a peculiar gesture: palms flat against the marble like he was bracing himself to move a heavy object, setting himself to a task he wasn’t sure that he was ready to undertake. “I mean, if you want to, the bed is— We shared okay in Grand Junction.”

Rush hunched his shoulders and wound his arms tightly against his chest. “You snore,” he said bitingly. “Unbearably. Even worse, I expect, when you’re drugged to the gills.”

Young’s face was turned away, so Rush couldn’t see his reaction— only the minute, exhausted shrug. “Fine. Then go, I guess.”

But Rush did not go. He stared murderously at the marble countertop and drove the nails of his hands into the base of his clenched fists. He considered the comparative relief that destroying something would provide: a sophisticated block cipher, a radio, a reputation, or even perhaps one of the cheap china plates. A barstool. He could break the one he was sitting on against the wall. It would shatter. This was the opposite experience to being touched. An assertion of existence. An act of sufficiency: you cannot stop me from— _you_ cannot _stop me_. You cannot stop  _me._

But he did not break the barstool, or the plates, and he did not demand that Young provide a laptop that he could use to do the other sorts of damage. Instead, for reasons he could not explain, he wrenched off the blazer he had retrieved from the locker where it had been stored, wadded it up into a hard ferocious bundle, and hurled it viciously at the hated sofa’s Nimrodian leather back.

“ _Fuck you_ ,” he hissed, and stalked off in the direction of the bedroom.

His hands were shaky with adrenaline, he noticed in the hallway, presumably as a delayed response to all the day’s many, many deaths.

* * *

Rush had stripped to his t-shirt and boxers by the time Young joined him, and was curled into a tense, unmoving knot under Young’s dreadful Southwestern-themed duvet. Hoping to avoid any attempt at interlocution, he had turned the overhead light off. Perhaps Young might suppose he was asleep, he thought. Perhaps Young might simply ignore him, and then in the morning Young would be sleeping or Young would be gone, and Rush would be spared the need to even acknowledge his presence, warm, bulky, sighing, snoring, and slightly wood-smelling, a dull-witted and tasteless block of a man who belonged in a bed— a bed, where people slept when they were trying to be people, when they had no greater aim in mind than that.

And, in fact, Young undressed quietly in the dark, and got into the bed without speaking, making only a few quiet sounds of pain. For a while he lay unmoving on his back. Rush could hear him breathing, a sound that was not like any other sound in existence. Just the sound of someone breathing.

“Hey,” Young said softly and unexpectedly.

Rush made a grudging noise indicating awareness.

“Are you— you know— okay?”

Rush stared at the bare bedroom wall, turned a milky greyish colour by shadows and the moonlight through the window’s slats. “Obviously,” he said flatly.

“I was really—“ Young stopped. “I’m glad you made it back,” he said at last.

Rush screwed his eyes shut and buried his injured face in the pillow. It’s not too late, he thought; it’s _not too late_ —

But he did not know what he was afraid it might soon be too late for, or how he was supposed to act to avert it, and in the vague state he was in, very close to sleep, it seemed to him that the cataclysmically threatening _it_ might be somehow connected to sleep itself: a warm, dark, and physical falling-forwards that looped and tightened frightening cords around him, anchoring him at the ankle and wrist in the desolating covenant of corporality, impressing him into desires he didn’t want to fulfill, until there was no escape and he knew the cords would hurt to cut now, because they had grown into the fabric of his own skin, but he _would_ have to cut them, he had always known he would have to cut those cords, eventually, in the end—

He could feel them already, the notes that would do the cutting, rising from the black back of his mind to unpick any knots that had been made, Dx4, xE4, xF#4, Ax4, reaching from some part of him that did not belong to him any longer or had not belonged to him when he had last checked, and—

He made an miserable, half-conscious sound, and was aware of Young’s proximity increasing. Young didn’t touch him; he just lay there: an unseen sheltering body. A block.

“Shh,” Young whispered. Once more just a sound. Not a stupid platitude, promising that everything would be okay.

Rush turned blindly towards him, with no particular purpose, and pressed his face to Young’s chest, the bandage at the bridge of his nose scraping slightly against the place where skin met shirt-collar. He shifted so his cheek was pressed to Young's neck and let himself rest there. He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to be said.

Slowly, Young brought his arm up and wrapped it around Rush, palm settling flat between his shoulders. “Shh,” he said again.

It was no kind of thing to say, no language at all, only hushing out a comfort he couldn’t deliver. And yet Rush fisted a hand in Young’s shirt and for a long time, until he slept, held on as though he believed in the reality of that comfort, something warm and invisible or maybe microscopic, a kind of human radiation that did the opposite of disturb, something that could carry rest across the impassable chasm between bodies and deliver it from Young to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rush quotes an article called "A numerical study of the benefits of driving jellyfish bells at their natural frequency," as well as two songs by John Cale: "Andalucia" and "Paris 1919."


	23. Chapter 23

Young woke to two sensations he had not expected.

The first and most immediate was the pain that didn’t so much knife through him as curl in a series of elegant knots under his skin, flourishes done by an expert in some Japanese rope art with ropes that happened to be made from his nerves and muscles. If he’d had a screwdriver handy, he would have stabbed it into his hip. Without one, he wasn’t sure how he was going to be able to sit up, because the knots were hard and tense and designed to hold.

The other sensation, less painful but in some ways no less problematic, was Rush snuffling softly against his chest: warm-mouthed and quiet, his hand loosely tangled in Young’s t-shirt. Young felt unexpectedly comfortable having him there, as though that was the right place for him to go: just there, flush against Young’s body, with Young’s arm wrapped around him.

Don’t move, Young thought to himself. Don’t move; don’t spoil everything; just— stay still.

Like a traveler in the backcountry, unexpectedly confronted by something deadly: a wild animal, rare and sleek skittish and dangerous, that you knew could kill you, but that you couldn’t run from.

He and David had never really… _slept_ together, was the thing. David fucked like he did everything else: in sudden bursts that seemed at the same time both without any forethought and somehow planned-for down to the smallest touch, like he’d practiced all the skills but not known precisely when he might get the chance to use them. He’d grappled with Young against walls and against kitchen tables, on the pristine black leather sofa in his immaculate, minimalist house, and once, memorably, over a car hood; they’d even done it in bed a couple of times, always at David’s, but David didn’t have the kind of bed that really seemed designed for sleep. And besides, it had never been the right time. So they had just stretched out on the blank and starchy white sheets, sweat cooling on their bodies, not really touching. David would smoke a cigarette and they’d watch TV, and sometimes Young would catch David looking at him in a way that no one had ever looked at Young, with a dark, tender, restless, and indecipherable yearning, like even though he’d just had Young, there was some barrier between them he still couldn’t cross. A whole glass suit of armor that David was wearing, Young thought, because it wasn’t on _his_ side, that barrier; even if he also always wanted something that didn’t seem to happen, to say a word that he never seemed to find on his lips.

He couldn’t imagine sleeping with David, anyway. Of course he couldn’t. The idea was laughable, ridiculous. —The idea of sleeping with a man, he would’ve said. It was one thing to sleep in the field, side-by-side, or even arms touching, on a mission; one thing to measure each other’s bodies with your eyes; one thing to fuck; but there were ways you didn’t touch a man, even when you were fucking, ways you didn’t look at him, things you didn’t say, not because you didn’t want to seem— but because it was different with a man than it was with a woman. Women needed those touches, so you touched even if you didn’t feel the same instinctual urgency to touch them. They needed to be told, _I’m not going to hurt you_. They liked to be desired by men. David would have taken it as an insult, or worse, a sign of weakness, if Young had said, _I want you_ , even in those moments when his whole body hummed with how much he did. Because— because. Men weren’t made to be something that was wanted. They didn’t need that. Young didn’t need that.

There were rules. It was like walking in a spiderweb. But every little thread of the web was the one that could destroy you, the one that had the spider’s poison on it. You had to know where to put your feet. You had to walk with confidence, because if you paused you’d lose your balance. It was good, really, assuming you learned the steps like you were supposed to. You stood up straight and never had to look where you were going.

But if you paused—

Young closed his eyes. His hand, on Rush’s back, touched the ends of Rush’s long hair. It felt good against his fingers, even though it needed to be cut. He couldn’t tell Rush that— that it felt good, or that Rush should get his hair cut, anymore than he could describe this moment, how perfectly Rush fit under his hand, how Young would take the pain of lying here with his busted leg and spine and hip just for the peace he hadn’t known he’d wanted, for whatever it was Rush had wanted from him in the moment when he’d turned, full of wordless asking.

Don’t, he thought to himself.

Don’t pause.

So, very gently, he unwrapped himself from Rush. Rush screwed up his nose and made a kind of _mmph_ sound of dissatisfaction, clenching his hand in Young’s shirt. But Young managed to detach him, and he seemed to drop into a deeper sleep afterwards.

It helped, Young thought, that it hurt so much to get out of bed; he had to focus on not making noise, and figuring out how to bend his hip, and the pain whited out what he might have felt when he finally made it to standing and looked down at Rush lying there. So he just felt pain, pretty much, generally, and with a sense of profound resignation he limped off to the kitchen to take a muscle relaxant and a Percocet and start the day.

* * *

It was well past noon by the time Rush emerged. Young had settled onto the couch with his reading glasses, his laptop, and the stack of Committee #6 meeting transcripts, which someone had helpfully stuck in a locked briefcase for him while he was offworld. The Percocet helped with the reading, he thought; he’d managed to get through a good chunk of the less appalling transcripts, to the point where the IOA got involved and Camile Wray joined up, before he had to stop and sit for a while, staring out the window into the mercifully blank white shield of the sun.

That was what he was doing when he saw Rush shuffle out of the hallway, somehow managing to look both sleepy-eyed and bad-tempered, wearing the jeans he’d had on yesterday and one of Young’s Air Force t-shirts.

“Morning,” Young said, trying for _casual_ and hitting _cautious_. “Thanks for asking to borrow my shirt.”

Rush ignored him. The refrigerator opened and closed, just out of Young’s range of vision. A few minutes later, a cabinet door slammed viciously shut. Rush started hacking at something with a knife, more forcefully than was probably necessary. The smell of coffee filled the apartment, followed by the scent of something frying.

“I guess you’re feeling okay,” Young said, tipping his head back against the couch so he could see Rush. “You want to bring me some of that coffee?”

No answer.

He sighed, eyeing the stack of transcripts. After a second’s consideration, he stuffed them back in the briefcase and re-locked it, then began the process of getting himself up off the couch. It wasn’t great, but he could do it, and when it was done, he grabbed his laptop and made his way to the kitchen island.

Rush was standing at the stove, staring fixedly at a skillet and a pot of boiling water. He didn’t acknowledge Young’s presence, even when Young cleared his throat loudly and made a show of clunking around getting his laptop set up. His only concession was to extract a cup of coffee from the elaborate coffee maker about five minutes after Young’s arrival, and place it in a plausibly deniable location approximately a foot to the left of Young.

It was good coffee. Young drank it in slow sips, watching Rush sauté cubes of potato.

“So,” he said eventually. “You’re mad at me, as usual, for some secret reason you’re going to refuse to tell me and then forget when you find something more interesting to be mad about. Or else you didn’t take one of the pills Lam gave you last night, even though I told you to, and now you’re sore as hell and don’t want to have to admit it’s your own fault.”

Rush’s shoulders stiffened, but he didn’t turn.

“Or both,” Young said. “I guess it could be both.”

“I dislike having my consciousness fucked with,” Rush said. His voice sounded rusty. “In certain directions.”

“Hey, what do you know? It speaks.”

“Fuck off.” Rush more-or-less hurled a plate of food at Young across the surface of the island, and then, as an afterthought, a single fork.

It was surprisingly normal food, by Rush’s standards: home-fried potatoes, cheese, tomatoes, and poached eggs, artistically arranged on top of handmade corn tortillas. Maybe Rush was going through a street food phase. More likely he was tired.

“You know,” Young said, “taking a painkiller isn’t really going to fuck with your consciousness. It’s just going to make you hurt less and maybe get some sleep.”

Rush was eating with his back to Young, still facing the stove. “I’ve got work to do.”

“Maybe take the day off. You just cracked one of the chevrons.” Young took a bite of one of the open-faced tacos. It was good.

“My work is, unlike yours, actually rather important.”

Young rolled his eyes. “Uh, yesterday my work involved fishing you out of an ocean on an alien planet, after taking a dive to rescue the data you didn’t secure, so I’m thinking that at the very least it’s pretty important to _your_ work.”

Rush pushed his plate away abruptly, hunching his shoulders.

“—And _I’m_ taking the day off,” Young said, suddenly aware that he had trespassed into dangerous waters without knowing precisely how or where. “So maybe you could join me. I could use the help; I’m supposed to stay off my leg.”

There was a pause.

“—Fine,” Rush said curtly.

Young had expected the conversation to be more difficult, and maybe to end with slamming doors. He eyed Rush warily while polishing off the last of his coffee, trying to figure out the catch. “Really?” he asked.

Rush glanced at him over his shoulder— the first time Young had gotten a good look at his face all morning. He’d taken the bandage off. There were shadows under his eyes approximately the same color as the blue bruise on the bridge of his nose. Quickly, he dropped his gaze to the stovetop. “You seem surprised,” he said.

“Normally you’re, uh—“ Young searched for a polite way to describe Rush’s normal behavior. “Very committed to your positions?” he offered carefully.

“Yes, well. Perhaps I have a secret plan.”

“You say that like it wouldn’t be pretty much the least surprising explanation.”

“I have a plan. It’s not particularly secret.” Rush reached out and picked up his plate, then stood holding it tightly, as though he didn’t know what to do with it, or with himself, beyond that act. “To be left alone so I can do my work. To dial the ninth chevron. That’s all there is. That’s _all_ there is. I have no interest in anyone or anything beyond that. _Nothing._ I just want— I want to be _left alone_ with the _cipher_ , which apparently is too complicated a desire for people to grasp, as though I must have a _secret plan_ , when in fact to me it seem both simple and obvious, and— why not?— let’s add on _logical_ , too; it’s _logical_ , why _wouldn’t_ I want to be alone; what the fuck would I want with other people? _What a piece of work is a man_ , I mean, Christ, perhaps if you cut him open, or digitize him; otherwise he’s practically worthless, devoid of information, so what— so—“ His voice, which had been steadily escalating in volume, suddenly faltered.

He turned around and stared blankly down at where each of his hands now held one piece of the almost-perfectly-halved plate. It must’ve cracked at some point during his impromptu monologue. The point where each half had sheared off was so neat and straight that it looked as though Rush had done a magic trick. Young would’ve been reminded of a Catholic priest breaking the Eucharist, except that Rush looked so bemused.

Young didn’t say anything. He was holding his breath, not sure how to respond. It was important to him… It was important to him, he thought, not to say the wrong thing.

“— _And_ you’ve got shit taste in crockery,” Rush finished unsteadily, sounding— more than anything— lost.

“Yeah,” Young said.

“But I can— I can remedy that, obviously. Online shopping. And I can work from here. I can do preliminary work. On the ninth cipher.” But he didn’t move. He continued staring at the broken plate.

Young stood, trying not to wince too much as his back straightened, and, using the countertop as a crutch, limped over and gently pried the pieces of plate out of Rush’s hands. He pitched them in the trashcan. “Yeah,” he said. “I think that sounds good.”

“You do?” Rush squinted at him as though he didn’t quite believe it.

“Sure. I’m gonna, uh, sit on the couch and—“ Young jerked his hand vaguely over his shoulder. “Answer some emails. You can do your cipher work.”

“Sure,” Rush echoed. He seemed perplexed, and when Young had managed to collect his laptop and make his halting way to the couch, he was still standing there, in front of the stove, brow furrowed, looking like he wasn’t quite sure what had just happened, or what he was supposed to do next.

* * *

Young ended up sticking to his word and opening his email inbox, because he couldn’t very well read the committee transcripts with Rush in the room. At least, that was how he felt. And Rush wasn’t just in the room, but actually sitting on the other side of the sofa, squinting at one of the little notebooks he seemed to always have in his pockets, jotting down impenetrable scribbles from time to time with a cheap ballpoint pen. Probably he was working on the ninth cipher, though Young couldn’t tell, really, and didn’t want to ask— it felt like they’d reached a fragile detente of some kind, side-by-side in the still and sunlight-warmed apartment, and he didn’t want to disturb it.

After a while, Rush’s pen stopped scratching at the notebook. The hunch of his spine softened; his hands went limp; his head tipped back. He was asleep.

Of course he was asleep. Young rolled his eyes with an impatient fondness and carefully removed the pen and notebook from Rush’s hands.

Rush huffed without waking and drew his eyebrows together in an expression of consternation, like even in his sleep he could tell that Young had conned him into doing something that was actually healthy. He dragged his knees up towards his chest, and then— before Young could stop him, or really even realize what was happening— he managed to perform a sort of combination topple-burrow-slide that ended with his face mashed into Young’s shoulder. It didn’t look very comfortable, especially with a broken nose, but it didn’t wake him up, either, and Young sat there for a moment, startled, wondering what to do.

He didn’t _mind_ , exactly. He would’ve minded with Cam or David, though he had a hard time imagining it happening in the first place. In the field, sure, maybe, when you’re sitting around, or on a long transport, but he’d just shove them off, then, and it’d be a joke— an affectionate one, but still, cordoning off the area, making sure the web was clearly marked, because otherwise it would feel like a threat, that gesture. A man might as well hit him as let his head rest on Young’s shoulder. It was more or less the same.

But he couldn’t see Rush as a threat. On an intergalactic level, maybe— hell, even just on the terrestrial level, Rush had proven he could pretty much sit down at a computer terminal and take down the SGC. And he was scrappy in a fight, and got nasty when he was frightened, and liked to destroy Young’s property and do stupid shit. But fundamentally he was just the wrong size, somehow, to be threatening. It wasn’t just that he was little. He had a different shape in some other sense: soft where Young expected him to be hard, and vice versa, with claws where there ought to have been weak spots and weak spots where there should have been claws.

Maybe that made him more dangerous than someone like David. In another world, it probably would. But it meant that this, here, now, the weight of Rush’s head on Young’s shoulder, the dig of his glasses and the damp exhale of his breath, this, this, wasn’t alarming, and Young would take it, he thought. He’d take it.

So he didn’t move.

Eventually he thought to check his email again. Landry had forwarded Young Alaniz’s reprimand, like Young might have been unaware of its existence, with a one-line note: _Let’s talk about this._

Jackson had sent him a wry, terse message: _Alaniz told Lam what you’ve been up to. I’d stay away from the base till you’re back on your feet, unless you want her to find an excuse to stick you with needles. You’re cleared to see Telford any time you’d like to, just let security know a few hours ahead. I’ll be offworld for a couple of days but I want to talk to you when you’ve read the most recent transcripts. Let me know when a good time would be._

From Mitchell: _Sorry man. U still mad at me? Going offworld but beer when I get back. You’re on leave right? yes. YOu are. Please just take a gd nap._

And then, as if all that wasn’t enough, something from Emily, forwarded from his personal account. _Everett_ , she said. _It’s been a while. I hope you’re doing well. I’m sorry to bother you. I imagine you’re very busy. I’m looking for a green ceramic teapot with a hyacinth pattern. It was my grandmother’s, and I think it might have gotten mixed in with your things when we packed up the kitchen. Can you take a look, please? If you find it, let me know and I’ll come by to pick it up. Thanks. I hope you’re doing well. —Emily._

Of all things, it was the fact that she’d repeated herself that he couldn’t deal with. That second _I hope you’re doing well_. He didn’t know why. He felt so tired when he read it that he closed the computer and just sat for a minute, feeling like his whole body had gotten heavier and he couldn’t stand up.

On his shoulder, Rush shifted and made a sighing, complaining noise. Weirdly, the noise caught on Young like a little barb of contentment. But then he felt guilty, sitting there next to the briefcase full of transcripts that, at some point, he was going to have to take out and read.

He shut his eyes. But postponing it, he thought, wouldn’t make it any easier. And at least while Rush was asleep, he couldn’t snoop. So carefully, working not to wake Rush, Young unlocked the briefcase that he’d sandwiched between himself and the arm of the couch. The files inside were neatly arranged by date. It had struck him that morning, how well-organized they were, how someone must have spent time going through the transcripts and doing it, that that was someone’s job, maybe Harriman’s, to look at them afterwards, as part of a casual day at the office, and think, This one goes in that place. As though it made a difference.And it did make a difference, Young supposed. Of course it did. It was so much easier to find what he was looking for. It was easy to find the transcript where Landry said—

> _LANDRY: I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding about why you’re here._
> 
> _WRAY: There’s no misunderstanding._
> 
> _LANDRY: It seemed likely, in the event of the Icarus Project’s success, that uncomfortable questions would be raised regarding how that success came about. While it’s true that we generally consider it easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission—_
> 
> _WRAY: You thought you’d aim for the best of both worlds._
> 
> _LANDRY: We can offer the IOA plausible deniability. What we’re asking in return is not to be asked those uncomfortable questions. It’s not necessary that a representative be present at these meetings, if you feel that would make your job more difficult._
> 
> _WRAY: That was made clear to me. I chose to come._
> 
> _JACKSON: Why?_
> 
> _WRAY: Excuse me?_
> 
> _JACKSON: Why choose to come? To be honest, I think that most of us would rather not be here._
> 
> _WRAY: But you’re here._
> 
> _JACKSON: Yes._
> 
> _WRAY: Because this is where we are. If I allowed my safety to be bought at a price I couldn’t bring myself to contemplate, that would seem…_
> 
> _JACKSON: Disingenuous?_
> 
> _WRAY: I was going to say: immoral._
> 
> _LANDRY: Well, maybe we should go ahead and talk about that price. Camile, if you’ll take a look at the file to your left— meet Nicholas Rush._
> 
> _TELFORD: I object to referring to him as a ‘price.’For Christ’s sake, you make it sound like we’re going to sell him to the Lucian Alliance or cut his heart out on an altar. For all we know, he’s lucky. We’re giving him an incredible opportunity._
> 
> _JACKSON: Yes. So incredible that you picked a mentally unstable man whose wife was dying, moved him halfway across the country a week after her death, convinced him he was here to do math, and told him he wasn’t allowed to leave his apartment without a military escort!_
> 
> _O’NEILL: And how happy all our lives would be if he decided to follow that rule._
> 
> _TELFORD: I didn’t pick him. The genes picked him._
> 
> _JACKSON: Do you feel absolved by that fact, David?_
> 
> _WRAY: I don’t understand why he hasn’t been told._
> 
> _JACKSON: An interesting question. If it’s such an incredible opportunity._
> 
> _TELFORD: He doesn’t need to be told. The project’s not at that stage yet._
> 
> _WRAY: At what stage does he need to be told?_

Young looked, involuntarily, at where Rush was drooling on his shoulder. He wondered what had been in the file that Wray had been given. Rush’s medical records, he guessed. A full biography. A photograph? Probably Jackson, if no one else, would have pushed for one to be included, thinking that it would humanize Rush. And maybe it would. Maybe Wray would have picked up the photograph and felt like she knew this person, when she knew nothing. Young had only known Rush for about a month at this point, and he still could’ve told her that. Meet Nicholas Rush, he wanted to tell her. He threw a fork at my wall. He was going to put toothpaste on my ceiling. He acts like a five-year-old when he doesn’t get his way. He doesn’t trust anybody, and he thinks we’re all idiots, and then he turns around and expects us to cater to his every whim. He’s teaching math to a girl who hit him in the face with a pistol. He thinks about buffalo herds crossing the prairie. He fell asleep next to me in bed, and it felt good to hold him.

You couldn’t look at a photograph and know what someone’s body was going to feel like when it was alive under your hand. When you put your hand between their shoulder blades, over their backbone, knowing exactly how easy it was to break a backbone. Wanting to protect them from everything. From that.

At what stage does he need to be told? he thought.

He remembered Jackson saying, _Do you really think that— I mean, even if you told him—_

 _He wants to be the one who goes,_ Jackson had said.

But Rush wasn’t a child. And Jackson had called him _mentally unstable,_ but Young didn’t think he was that, either. Or— well, what did that even mean? A person who couldn’t be trusted to make his own decisions? Rush could make his own goddamn decisions. They just usually weren’t the decisions that other people had wanted him to make. They were made according to some strange private rubric that Rush didn’t bother to share with anybody else, that Rush _didn’t_ share with anybody else, on some really basic, fundamental level. That wasn’t the same as being crazy.

Then the problem was, though: how much easier would it be to call him crazy when it came to the one decision that you really, really didn’t want him to make?

Young turned to the most recent transcript, which was dated just after David went MIA.

> _O’NEILL: What I want to know is, who authorized him going on that goddamn mission?_
> 
> _LANDRY: It was a critical situation. There was a real possibility that taking action was going to reveal the identity of the Lucian mole._
> 
> _O’NEILL: Sending the head of this project to go aboard a Lucian warship? You know what that is? I’ll give you a hint: it starts with_ bull _and rhymes with—_
> 
> _LANDRY: It was his call._
> 
> _O’NEILL: You know why we have a chain of command? It’s so the little idiots have to run their bright ideas by someone else, who hopefully isn’t just a bigger idiot!_
> 
> _JACKSON: Jack._
> 
> _O’NEILL: Do not start with me, Daniel._
> 
> _JACKSON: I just think— we should figure out what he knows that they don’t know. That they didn’t know. Yet. Specifically._
> 
> _O’NEILL: Apart from, I don’t know, the identity of the Icarus planet we located and_ all of our plans?
> 
> _JACKSON: Yes. Apart from that._
> 
> _LANDRY: It’s more complicated than that. We had a report come in two weeks ago from an undercover member of SG-14 that suggested the Alliance was aware of the location of the laboratory on P3X-124— the former Anubis site where we’d attempted the most significant retrofitting. Everything we know about the Alliance’s commitment to dialing the nine-chevron address leads us to expect that an attack on this site would be a top priority for them. In fact, we’d beefed up our forces there in preparation. It’s the most complete lab facility Anubis left behind; if we lost control of it, our ability to go through with this… procedure would be all but derailed. The Alliance_ has _to know that. Even if they weren’t attempted the procedure themselves—_
> 
> _O’NEILL: But they haven’t attacked._
> 
> _LANDRY: They haven’t attacked._
> 
> _O’NEILL: Why haven’t they attacked?_
> 
> _LANDRY: That’s my question._
> 
> _WRAY: You think they have an alternative method of carrying out the procedure._
> 
> _LANDRY: Yes._
> 
> _WRAY: If there’s an alternative method, why haven’t we pursued that as an option?_
> 
> _LANDRY: Carolyn?_
> 
> _LAM: I want to be very clear. Are there alternative ways to achieve the physiological effects we’re seeking? Yes. Yes, there are. Theoretically, any method that managed to artificially adjust protein biosynthesis and achieve a new, stable, permanent homeostasis would be successful. The experimental apparatus that Anubis used is more-or-less arbitrary, except that we know of no other means to achieve that homeostasis. It’s certainly possible that the Lucian Alliance could have solved this problem. However, if I’m correctly interpreting Ms. Wray’s underlying question— while I understand that all of us would feel a lot better if we weren’t using Goa’uld technology, and that’s an obvious benefit of finding another method, the real issue here is the outcome of the procedure. Would the patient— Would the_ subject _survive. In what condition would he survive. And, I suppose, how traumatic would such a procedure be. There is no method that is going to remove those concerns._
> 
> _WRAY: I see._
> 
> _LANDRY: My point is, it may not matter what Colonel Telford tells them. If Telford’s alive. We may be looking at a race to the finish line._
> 
> _LAM: I’ve made significant progress in manufacturing the chemical compounds necessary to use the laboratory. If we—_

Rush stirred and, with a sound like a miffed and drowsy cat, lifted his head off of Young’s shoulder.

Young hastily closed the file and slid it back into the briefcase. “Hey,” he said.

Rush shoved his glasses up his nose and made a not-very-effective attempt to get his hair under control. “Was I—“ he said, squinting and looking a little suspicious, but mostly confused. “Was I asleep on your shoulder?”

“Yeah,” Young said. He flipped the lid of the briefcase closed.

“Why was I asleep on your shoulder?” The tone of his voice made it sound like he thought Young had somehow tricked him into it.

“Uh, because you were really goddamn tired?”

“No,” Rush said. He pushed himself away from Young, towards the other end of the sofa. He was giving Young an even more suspicious look now.

“Hate to break it to you,” Young said, “but yes.”

“What were you reading?” Rush’s eyes had flicked to the briefcase.

“Nothing.”

“Something you didn’t want me to see.”

“No,” Young said guiltily. “Files. For work.”

“About what?”

“Work stuff.”

Rush narrowed his eyes. “You’re on leave.”

“Yeah, but—“ Young floundered, maybe, a little. “I told you, in the car, after the Lucian attack. That Landry and O’Neill wanted me to take over the Icarus Project.”

Rush’s face didn’t change, but in a way that made Young nervous. “But David’s back now.”

“He’s waiting to be cleared. And he needed a second-in-command anyway.”

“Needed,” Rush said. “He _needed_ a second-in-command.”

“Yeah.”

“But he doesn’t any longer.”

“No.”

“Because you took the position.”

There was no real reason Young ought to be feeling so uncomfortable, almost on the brink of nausea. “Yeah.”

Rush jerked his head towards the briefcase, a small, tight, controlled movement. “They’re about me. The files.”

Lying wasn’t an option. “Yes,” Young said. “Partly.”

“You know why they recruited me to the project. Why they sent samples of my cells to Atlantis. Why they sequenced my genes.”

“Yes,” Young said. His voice came out uneven.

Rush nodded sharply and looked away. “How long have you known?”

“Just since—“ Young swallowed. “Jackson gave me the files when you left with Sheppard.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

“What?”

Rush stood abruptly, but didn’t go anywhere— just stared down at the coffee table, a tic starting at the edge of his mouth. “Are you going to tell me what’s in the files?”

Young didn’t say anything at first. His mind had gone blank and slow in a way he couldn’t remember happening since he was a shitbrained nineteen-year-old. Or: no— it had happened when he came home and saw Emily holding the phone. It had shown on her face, that she knew about David. A white rush of adrenaline had gone through him, and he’d understood, as though he were out of his body, looking at the scene from a distance, that this was one of those moments from which there was no simple way to go-forwards— that a road had ended, and he was going to have to build a path through the wilderness that stretched out in all directions. But he didn’t know how. He’d spent so long thinking he wouldn’t have to do it, that the road might just keep going, that it was impossible for the world to really change like that, and so when the time came he was unprepared. He scrabbled in the dirt, unable to even make a cobblestone come together. And Emily had pushed him out into the tall grass.

Now he thought: but maybe I can go just a little further. (A nonphysical or figurative distance— he remembered. But a distance nonetheless.) He found his voice. “I can’t,” he said. “It’s classified. You don’t have the clearance.”

Rush continued staring at the coffee table. “How can I not have the clearance? It’s _about me_.”

“You know how it works. You know the system.”

“The _system_ ,” Rush said. His lip curled. “The fucking _system_ , the fucking _military_ , the fucking _Air Force_ that tells you what you can know and when you’re allowed to know it, that pats you on the shoulder and says _Don’t worry your pretty little head_ , and that’s all right with you, it doesn’t occur to you that _knowledge is a right_ ; you’re so beaten-fucking-down that you believe everyone else has the right to make decisions for you because they fucking averaged their way to the top with their outstanding displays of being perfectly mediocre; that _you_ have the right to make decisions for _me,_ even though it’s _my life_ , not yours; it’s _my fucking body_ —“

“I’m trying to help you!” Young said, too loud.

Rush laughed, short and humorless.

“Would it be better if I didn’t know either? Would that make you happy? Huh? I’m trying to _help_ you; why the fuck do you think I took the job?”

“I think,” Rush said precisely, turning to face him and giving him a cold, clinical, distant look, “that you’re too broken for _the system_ to bother with you anymore, and you know it. I think you’re never going back into the field, and you were going to be given a nice steady desk job, and if you didn’t take it, they were going to shrug and turf you out. But instead someone came to you with an offer. You could have David’s project, and you could run it on fucking crutches. They didn’t mind that you were crippled. How incredibly fucking generous of them. All you had to do was agree to manage their fucking _resource_. Feed him; keep an eye on him; drive him home. Get him into _bed._ ”

“That’s not what happened,” Young said, feeling sick.

“Isn’t it?”

“I’m trying to _protect_ you.”

“I don’t want your fucking protection.” Rush shoved past Young’s legs abruptly and headed for the door.

“Rush—“ Young struggled to stand, his breath escaping between his teeth with a hiss.

“Fuck off.”

“It’s not— _like_ that, what you said; it’s not true.”

Rush had reached the door, but rounded with his hand on the doorknob. “Then tell me what’s in the files.”

“I _can’t_.”

“Right,” Rush said, and flung the door open.

Young had managed to work his way upright, but his head was swimming. “Can you just stop and think about this rationally for a second?”

Rush didn’t even look at him. “Fuck you,” he said.

And then he was gone, slamming the door behind him so hard that the walls shook.

Young sank back onto the couch and put his head in his hands. “Fuck,” he said. “ _Fuck._ ”

He felt helpless. He wanted to punch something; to spar with someone, to hit a punching bag if he couldn’t put his fist through a wall. He wanted to run till the breath in his lungs hurt going in and out, and the muscles of his legs felt like they didn’t belong to him. At the very least, he wanted to be able to tell Rush that every part of what Rush had said was wrong, that there was no piece of him that hadn’t just wanted the job, no piece of him that would have done anything to take it, because Rush was right, and he was broken. Alaniz had as good as told him so.

But he couldn’t do any of those things. That was how useless he was now. He had to just sit there on the couch, next to the slowly fading trace of warmth Rush had left behind him. He felt himself scrabbling again in the dirt, a feeble and pathetic figure who couldn’t ever figure out the right words to say, the words that would be form a solid road for him. That was all he wanted, just some sense that he was headed in the right direction. But he didn’t know where he wanted to get. So there were no directions. He was stuck there.

He tipped his head back and let it rest against the back of the couch, staring at the ceiling.

Eventually he would have to get up, he guessed. Go in search of the painkillers he badly needed, get a drink of water, do the stretches he’d been prescribed for his hip. It would hurt, but he couldn’t just stay in the same place forever.

“I’m going to,” he said out loud, like he was arguing with himself. “I’m going to do it.”

But he couldn’t bring himself to. Not yet.


	24. Chapter 24

Rush woke with the word _oratorio_ on his lips and the distinct sense that he had been dreaming.

His hands were pressed to the hardwood floor.

Had he been scrabbling against something he could not defeat in his sleep? His dreams tended to be brutal. He was fighting against unseen enemies, or he was trapped. For years he’d had, from time to time, variations of the same recurring dream: he was travelling to an important occasion— his wedding, a conference, a security consultation, a prize ceremony— and he realised that a part of him was missing or damaged in a way that he ought to have to noticed. He had left it behind, like one might leave behind a piece of luggage; he’d forgotten something that it ought not be possible for one to forget: an eye, or an arm, or a lung, or a single leg-bone. It tended to be airport security, in the dreams, that pointed out these missing parts. They pulled him aside and showed him where a bit of the white shadow was missing from the outline of his body as laid bare by their machines. He experienced a rush of guilt, the shock of exposure. _We can’t let you travel like this_ , the dream-airport-security-agent said.

But his hands did not hurt, and he thought they would hurt if he had been fighting or clawing, trying to make it on board a plane that he was always just about to miss.

 _Oratorio_ , he thought. He tasted the word. Rosin dust and the dank insides of cathedrals; concert halls with their plush velvet seats and their coy ornate flourishes, the white curve of Gloria’s neck and the teardrop earring that dangled against it; her skirt rusting in the darkness as she turned towards him, her fingers tightening where they were tangled with his fingers as though she was afraid that he might get lost, afraid the music was a riptide that would carry him away from her. _Listen_ , she whispered. He had dreamed of this. _Listen._

 _I_ am _listening._

 _No, Nick—_ listen.

           Dx4  
__ xE4  
xF#4  
Ax4  
not-quite-Eflat5  
Axx4  
Ax4  
xF#4

He could not hear it now but still his brain wanted to tune towards it. His hands were spread in search of some ghost keyboard; they quested across the floor, they arched; and when he realised this he shoved himself back: scrambling half-seated and half-on-all-fours till he hit the wall, limp and shuddery-limbed.

He was cold and sweating and he felt sick.

He pushed his hair from his face unsteadily and swallowed.

He needed—

He needed—

The cypher stared at him from where he had inscribed it upon the wall. The ninth one. He had known, hadn’t he? He had known already on the planet with the badly-matched moons, when he had looked at the DHD and seen it as a chordophonic instrument although it was not chordophonic and he did not know what type of instrument it might be, but it was an instrument, some kind of instrument, one whose circles of softly depressible keys his hands wanted to touch. He had known then, but he had compelled the knowledge to remain in the dark and honeycombed under-caves of his consciousness, where things seethed and bred and luminesced without supervision because he did not want to look at them. Let them grow, as long as they did so where they did not disturb him.

_Listen._

And the city had sung.

 _I_ am _listening._

He had known that the cypher would be musical in nature.

He could not see it in the 0s and 1s and -1s that formed hypnotic rows in his cramped, crooked writing, but he knew that it would be there. The music. Not numbers. Not numbers but _notes_ ; numbers that were notes; numbers that once you had seen them as notes could nevermore be merciful numbers again.

Since he had returned to the blank white space of his apartment— however long ago that had been— he had thought about it without thinking about it.

Their tuning system was microtonal and he would need to know that; he did not want to know it, but he would need to know; and he did not know into how many notes they divided the octave; he assumed that they organised themselves around the octave, but perhaps that was an erroneous assumption, or no, it was all but universal, and physiologically they were similar, so they acknowledged it, surely; but what would the notes be, what were the intervals between them, how did they organise their scales; something about the sound of the glass bridge had made him think of gongs, metallophones, maybe gamelan’s not-quite-bells, tuned in irregular pentatonic patterns and meant to signal godly presence, but that was not the sound or not _quite_ ; but could he start there? Perhaps he could start there, and he had at any rate some of the pitches already, and he would need a laptop, a laptop with sCrypt to provide him with a set of possible plaintexts, and he would need to map the pitches he could hear in his head, the tones that vibrated through him as though he were nothing more than another glass slice in the bridgeway, a brick slotted into the city, a struck glass bell, but he too had a resonant frequency, so how was he any different? He could carry a current just as well as any other object, and it was ironic, really, or fitting, because he had always hated Colorado, but Tesla had come here to the half-dissected heart of the West, on the heels of the buffalo, in 1899, to Colorado Springs itself, to measure the resonant frequency of the planet, and he had dreamt of an Earth complete and perfect, the globe of it humming like a tuning fork; it was alive, he had said, _literally_ , literally alive with electrical vibrations, and in his effort to make it sing he had sent artificial lightning to unsuture the dark Southwestern air—

So— and now Rush too in pursuit of something that shivered half out of hearing— a message transmitted along some esoteric wavelength that machinery with its limitations was not suited to detect—

He was trying to stand and finding it difficult. But he needed a laptop and he had a vague sense that standing might be required if he were going to obtain one.

He levered himself up using the wall, leaving handprints of sweat on the white paint. The room was brighter than he had expected. Presumably it was some bright part of the day, although he did not know what part of what day that might be.

His phone was in his pocket. He took it out and stared at it for a moment, certain that he ought to call… someone and put his demands to them. Perhaps a general.

But he was distracted by the realisation that he would need a system of notation to account for the pitches he had heard, and that the Western stave would certainly not do; neither would Western accidentals be appropriate. Ideally he would have a sense of the standard intervals; then he could devise a means of marking these. He considered the notes he knew. They were not, however, sufficient. He could guess at the beginning pitch— something in the vicinity of 300 Hz? Then— he hummed the note— 320? Or a little lower. 355. Thereabouts. Then— 450? 600? Perhaps he could begin with these, assign them a standard notation. He would have to listen. He would have to  _listen_ to the music that he did not want to hear.

He had picked up the permanent marker, and was making notes on the wall, in the space below the trits of the cypher.

Someone knocked very loudly and precisely on the door.

He tilted his head, staring at the wall and thinking. The block letters of Ancient did not seem well-suited for applications in musical notation, but Sheppard’s script might prove useful in this capacity. Rush reached for Sheppard’s note and realised that he was not wearing a blazer, or, indeed, a button-down shirt, and furthermore that his blazer was currently located in— someone else’s apartment.

He closed his eyes in vexation.

The knock came again. “Rush,” a weary voice said. “Can you just open the door and talk to me?”

Perhaps he could speak to Young _through_ the door and convince him to leave the blazer and a laptop in the hallway. Or perhaps Young could be made to hand them over and then go away. But Rush did not think so. Young was very persistent.

He sighed.

“I know you’re there,” Young said. “Unless you’ve managed to escape the team of highly trained marines in the basement.”

Rush hurled the permanent marker across the room and stalked to the door, only a little unsteady.

“I’m more than capable of eluding the sorry assemblage of _morons_ your dismal fiefdom sees fit to inflict upon me,” he bit out, when he had opened the door the perhaps four-and-a-half inches that he had established as customary and judged to be objectively sufficient.

Young studied him for a long moment. “Right,” he said. “Okay. So, anyways, you’re here.”

Young’s face was etched all over with lines that spoke of stresses placed upon the body. His face was closed-off and he was leaning on his ridiculous crutches, which no doubt warped the musculature of the body and encouraged damage to the nerves. He was dressed in his black uniform, and somehow that seemed the most ludicrous and insulting element of the ensemble, though Rush could not quite decide whom it was most insulting to— Young, who insisted on putting back on the clothes that had gotten him badly hurt and nearly booted out of his organisation, or himself, to whom it was a reminder of that organisation: the only idea, object, or person that Young had any real allegiance to.

“I need a laptop,” Rush informed him. “With a 2.26 gigabyte processor and 4 gigs of RAM. Preferably a Lenovo, but I’ll take anything that’s capable of running Linux. Why are you not writing this down? I find it unfathomably optimistic of you to think you’ll remember.”

Young quirked his eyebrows in an expression of weary resignation. “Yeah, so— in case you were wondering, you look like shit.”

“And my blazer,” Rush said. “Jot that down as well.”

“You’re still wearing my shirt, so I’m guessing you haven’t showered since I saw you, which was two days ago. Have you eaten anything?”

“I fail to see how that concerns you in any regard.”

“Well, it definitely _concerns_ me.”

“Fuck off,” Rush said.

It had not occurred to him that he was still wearing Young’s Air Force t-shirt. He had not thought about what he was wearing. He had not thought about _Young_. He had relegated the entire topic to another area of his consciousness, where things that had little-to-no importance could be put in boxes and left to rot.

Young sighed. “I’m headed to the Mountain,” he said. “I thought I would see if you wanted to come with me. You know. To visit that Lucian girl. I guess you could probably also see about a laptop.”

Rush eyed him untrustingly. He needed the laptop, however. And now that Young had raised the possibility, he wished to speak to Ginn about the ninth cypher. If he did _not_ go with Young, he would have to arrange for a military escort. Communication with multiple levels of bureaucracy would ensue. He did not communicate well with bureaucrats, or with soldiers.

“You’d have to shower, though,” Young said, apparently sensing that he was tempted by the proposition. “And put shoes on. No shirt, no shoes—”

“Yes, yes,” Rush said irritably. “That particular feeble attempt at humour has had its potential well and truly exhausted.”

Young rested an arm against the doorframe. “I can wait inside, if you want to—“

Rush stared at him flatly without moving.

Young shut his eyes. A line appeared between them. “Right,” he said. “I’ll wait in _my_ apartment. Maybe I’ll make you a sandwich or something.”

“ _Don’t_ make me a sandwich,” Rush said.

* * *

When Rush knocked on Young’s door— noticeably cleaner, wearing shoes and a shirt in a subdued sort of green colour that he had not previously been aware he owned, but having opted not to shave or do up his cuff buttons so that Young would be aware that he, Rush, manifestly did not give a shit what Young might think— Young opened it holding a sandwich in Ziploc bag.

“Here,” Young said, and thrust the sandwich at Rush. “Hang on to that. I gotta get my crutches.”

Rush took the Ziploc bag between this thumb and forefinger and affixed it with a look of distaste. “Please enlighten me as to the meaning of this.”

“There’s no _meaning_ to it; it’s a sandwich,” Young said. He came lumping back towards the doorway like an animal with an indeterminate number of legs, bearing Rush’s blazer, which he thrust at Rush. “It’s got cheese in it. Cheese you bought. And an apple. And mustard. I figured you wouldn’t eat peanut butter.”

“And yet you ‘figured’ I’d eat this.” Rush managed to don the blazer one-handed and without endangering his disdainful expression.

Young gestured towards the door, and, ah, _there_ was the animal he was resembling: a sheepdog. Mission-orientated, woolly-furred, and overeager. “I figured if it was a choice between that and falling down, then, yeah, you probably would.”

“Well—“ Rush said, and grudgingly allowed himself to be shepherded. “I foresee no likelihood of falling over.”

“Then keep it as insurance.”

They were in the car park, climbing into Young’s car, when Rush said, “Is this meant to be an apology sandwich?”

Young’s mouth tightened. He started the engine. “No.”

“Good.”

“I just don’t want you keeling over on my watch.”

“Ah. I see. Difficult to explain to the generals, that one.”

Young made a sound that was half a sigh and half a groan of frustration. “That is not— Jesus. I don’t get why you can’t just accept that I’m trying to help you.”

“I don’t want to be _helped_. I want the information you’re keeping from me.”

“I would lose my job. I would be _court-martialled._ Do you understand that?” They were at a stop light. Young glanced at him with an agitated expression. “If I thought you’d keep your mouth shut, then it would be one thing, but you would _not_ keep your mouth shut; you’d do whatever the hell you felt like, as usual, and then I would be _fucked_ , and _you_ would be fucked, because _I am trying to protect you_. I’m trying to do it the best way I can, and I’m sorry if it sucks, but you’re gonna have to stick with me till I can— I don’t even know— figure out some better situation.”

“With your massive brain.” Rush leaned against the window and let his lip curl. “With your incredible intellect.”

“Yes,” Young said in a low voice. He sounded defeated.

Rush didn’t say anything. He assumed they had arrived at an impasse. Young was not going to give him the information, and Rush was not going to accept Young’s ludicrous excuse for a solution— that Rush should place some indefinite, unbounded amount of trust in Young’s ability to oversee Rush’s interests, in Young’s commitment to preserving Rush’s life, and the obscure reasons for such an allegiance, in the unknown and unknowable force that was the engine of his stupid and ineffable sandwich-making perseverance, in all of it as a material and congruent unit, in the body of it, the body of _Young_.

The body of Young, which was so obviously damaged.

Rush made a face as Young reached out and yanked the volume of the radio up in an obvious act of retaliation. The sound of Johnny Cash serenading Folsom Prison twanged through the car, abruptly loud. Rush tried to summon up the energy to despise it, as he despised all music anyway. But he had always rather liked Johnny Cash. There was something paradoxical in the man’s belief that the world could always do better, and his weariness that it never did. A simple belief, steady; laughable, maybe, but not childish.

Rush closed his eyes against Colorado’s onslaught of sunlight as he realised whom the idea reminded him of.

* * *

“Do _not_ ,” Young said as Rush left the lift, levelling an authoritative finger at him, “go wandering around. Do not go to the infirmary unless you are actually in need of medical attention. Just— stay where you are till I come get you, okay?”

Rush gave him an unimpressed look. “And where will you be, then?”

“I’m going to see David,” Young said.

The lift doors closed before Rush could respond.

Rush was left slightly open-mouthed and clutching the sandwich bag, feeling wrong-footed. It had not really occurred to him that Telford must be on base, or how the comprehension of this fact might impact Young. Now that he knew, he did not like the knowledge. He had no rational explanation for this feeling. It simply sat in him and ate up his attention, drawing attention to itself.

This was frustrating.

He turned on his heel and made his way to the block of cell-rooms where Ginn was being held.

* * *

“Your face is still discoloured,” Ginn said when he entered, eyeing him dubiously. “Were you supposed to take the bandages off so quickly? I don’t think there is very good medical care at this facility. Do your people have no former Goa’uld hosts who can use the _riftev?_ Should you not be asleep? You appear exhausted. Who is the overseer of your labour? They are failing to discharge their duty.”

Rush, leaned against the door and pinched the bridge of his nose. The periphery of a headache hung at the outer margins of his awareness, like a storm that had not quite materialised yet. “Please do me the bare minimum of kindness in not metamorphosing into Colonel Young.”

“Is _he_ your overseer?”

“I suspect we would all be in quite a lot of trouble if that were the case.”

Though perhaps it was the case, in a sense. Young was head of the Icarus Project. Did this now mean that Rush worked for him? He had never considered himself to work for Telford. _Against_ Telford, maybe, but not in some grand teleological fashion. More a constant process of outwitting, which was not hard to achieve. Telford, too, had known the game, and taken pleasure in it. He had assumed that everyone who came to the table was prepared for combat. —What table? Oh, a metaphysical table, maybe. The table at which you met all of your opponents, which was to say other people, because they were all opponents, and it was all, all of it, a game.

Young did not know the rules. That was his disadvantage. His disability. He had come blundering in, and Rush was expected to work _for_ or _against_ or— what other forms of relation were there?

The headache acquired a kind of form and solidity. He didn’t feel robust enough to contemplate this.

Without opening his eyes, he said, “I see that they didn’t, after all, buy you a new television.” He had noticed when he came into the room.

“No,” Ginn said, sounding regretful. “They took the old one away. They were afraid that I might hurt myself with the glass.”

Startled, Rush glanced at her. “Is that likely?”

She regarded him solemnly. She was perched on the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest. “No. It’s strange, though, don’t you think?”

“Is it?”

“I believe so. Yes. Because being a prisoner on Earth is so different. Almost like being a princess. You get escorted everywhere, and people bring you clothes and entertainment, and you may consume any variety of food that you like. But we do the same thing to prisoners, in the Alliance— I mean that we take away any object they might use to hurt themselves, even though _we_ are going to hurt them. Because— it’s not really the hurting that matters, is it? They don’t belong to themselves any longer. Not once we have them. So they don’t have the right.”

“—To hurt themselves,” Rush said.

“Yes. To— _do_ anything. Their body belongs to us now. It exists to be done to.” She looked away abruptly. “That’s why we— they— if you betray the Alliance, and they catch you, they cut it into your body. Your House mark. So you don’t forget.” She had pressed her hand to her chest, just under the clavicle.

There was a silence. Rush struggled to understand what to say next.

Ginn, perhaps seeing him at a loss, took a deep breath. “I do miss television,” she said with a false cheeriness, “but I’ve had so much more time to work on mathematics. Should we talk about Bernoulli numbers? I like the story of the girl who wrote the code to find them, for the Analytical Engine. _She_ was a princess, wasn’t she? Did the program work?”

Rush smiled involuntary. “She was a countess,” he said. “And it would’ve done. But no one ever managed to build the machine.”

Ginn looked thoughtful. Her head tilted. “She wrote code for a machine that didn’t exist?”

“Yes.”

“Difficult.”

“Not really. One has to be able to imagine each operation of the system. Not visually, but—“ Rush gestured. “Spatially. The levels, the layers of commands. Like a composer who imagines what the orchestra will sound like, even though it hasn’t yet been assembled.”

He heard what he had said, then, a beat late, and failed to register Ginn’s response. Something in what he said had subverted the course of his thoughts. His mind had turned and was brewing. A current beneath the surface of it demanded his attention. He had come here for a reason, hadn’t he? The music. The _music._

Dx4  
xE4  
xF#4  
Ax4—

  
He had run a current through the DHD crystals in an order determined by their natively configured resonant frequency—

  
not-quite-Eflat5  
Eflat5  
not-quite-Eflat5—  
Resonant frequencies.

Amanda Perry had written an article for some ludicrous university-style literary magazine, an article about the Ancients using code as music or music as code— Rush had not been paying attention at the time, and so did not remember which. The DHD crystals themselves did not _sound_ , but this did not mean that they could not be _played_. A chordophonic instrument. No. A code-ophonic instrument. He had _known_ it was the case. This morning—

Axx4  
not-quite-Eflat5  
Eflat5  
Fxx5  
Eflat5  
not-quite-Eflat5—

He had known. But—

How was it to be played?

Undetermined.

His fingers flexed without his conscious or explicit permission. A stray electrical impulse, or an autonomic reflex.

 _The earth was found to be_ , _literally,_ _alive,_ Tesla had said, _with electrical vibrations._

“Dr. Rush?” Ginn said, sounding anxious.

Rush realised he had been staring into space. He blinked. “Yes,” he said. “Sorry. I need your help with something. Not Bernoulli numbers. Have you got your laptop?”

Over the protest of some very paranoid voices in the ranks of Stargate Command, Ginn had been given a laptop with all forms of connectivity disabled. She needed it, Rush had argued, in order to train, if she were going to maximise her potential as an asset. He did not really understand what an asset, in the peculiarly vague-yet-institution-specific language of the military, might be, but he had ascertained that it was a word with great rhetorical power. _He_ was an asset.

Ginn retrieved the laptop from under her bed and handed it over, wearing an expression of confusion. “ _You_ have a laptop _,”_ she pointed out. “It’s better than mine.”

“It ended up underwater on another planet,” Rush said absently, setting the laptop on the room’s small desk and bending over it as it booted. “Young had to go diving for it.”

“I think Young must be glad that he is not your labour overseer,” Ginn said.

Rush wasn’t listening. He had opened sCrypt, and was inputting the ninth cypher. “The ninth cypher,” he said, managing with effort to speak in English and type in trits, “is musical. It’s _musical_. Its plaintext must take the form of a series of pitches, or— perhaps there’s some other means of indicating the identity of crystals, but ultimately it _must_ be pitches.”

“How do you know?” Ginn asked. Her brow was creased.

“Because the DHD is an instrument,” Rush said. “And I can hear it.”

He stared at the computer screen. sCrypt was searching for potential plaintext interpretations of the cypher that resembled the parameters Rush had specified: a sequence of rational numbers between 5 and 8000, probably integers and most likely in the 50 to 4000 range. A progress bar at the top of the window monitored the task’s rate of completion.

Ginn said cautiously, “You can _hear_ it?”

“—I _could_ hear it,” Rush amended after a pause, sliding a shifty glance at her. “Not— now. I’m not hearing it now. Obviously.”

Dx4  
xE4  
xF#4  
Ax4—

Ginn did not look particularly reassured. “I think you should sit down,” she said. “And eat your sandwich.”

Rush had forgotten about the fucking sandwich. He looked at it, sitting domestic as a housewife in its shiny plastic bag on the desk. “I’m not hearing things,” he said. “And I despise sandwiches.”

“Really? I like sandwiches. They’re topologically pleasing. I’d never eaten one before I came to Earth.” Ginn perched on the desk and picked up the sandwich, examining the square of it curiously. Young had used— of course he had done, fucking Young and his rudimentary American notions of boulangerie— white bread. “Is all Tau’ri food made in factories? The food in the mess hall is. It’s like every meal is a computer processor or an engine. Put together out of parts.”

“You’re trying to distract me,” Rush said. “It isn’t going to work.” He had turned back to the computer, and was watching the progress bar accrue percentage points.

Ginn’s mouth turned down. “Maybe I just want to talk about sandwiches,” she said. “I have never had an interlocutor with whom I could talk about sandwiches.”

“I’m baffled as to why you now feel that you do.”

She didn’t say anything. Her large eyes, with their changeable gem-like quality, rested on him. Some quirk of her anatomy caused her to always appear anxious; Rush could not pinpoint what it was, but located it perhaps in the shape of her eyebrows, or the overall thinness of her face. Her time in SGC detention had not caused her to appear less starved. But then, he of all people knew how it was: the body that deprivation had tailored, which never quite managed to lose its native shape.

“Our lives would be easier if we could change positions, wouldn’t they?” she said. It was not on the continuum of responses he had expected. “Then I would be able to talk about sandwiches, and you would be able to talk about nothing but cyphers. But I believe that only a short temporal interval would pass before you found that this experience less than sufficient.”

“No,” Rush said. He didn’t look at her. “You’re incorrect.”

“You cannot eat numbers. You cannot sleep beside them.”

sCrypt chimed. For a moment Rush stared at it, taking no action. His hands were planted on the table. “You’re describing a benefit,” he said at last. “You make the mistake of seeing it as an ontological flaw because you’re young.”

He bent his head and scanned the results of the sCrypt query. But to his irritation, he was, in fact, starting to feel lightheaded. He had not wanted to reveal as much to Young, but it was possible that he had not eaten in a number of days. He did not know how many days. He’d consumed coffee at various points in that span of time, which ought to be considered in the accounting of “food,” though he thought that Young would not see it that way.

The small white numbers on the screen swam. He tried to hear them as pitches.

“Fine,” he said snappishly, and snatched the sandwich bag from Ginn, ignoring her expression and taking a seat as he did. He tore chunks from the sandwich and ate them in fistfuls, staring at the computer screen. He had no opinions about the composition of the sandwich. Fucking apple and cheese. Young was a caricature of a person.

600 and 1200. That might be an octave. He had thought that the tonic of what he was hearing sat around 300 Hz. But it could be random error. Another possible plaintext interpretation had 1200 in it. And several seemed, on the surface, plausible as lines of music, because he did not know how an Ancient would have thought that music ought to sound. _Was_ it supposed to sound like music? Or was it a segment of crystal coding, the aesthetic qualities of which were arbitrary? Or were Ancient musical aesthetics in fact _determined_ by the utility of code?

It sounded like music to him. Or— it _could_ sound like music. If he would only allow it to—

He shook his head, attempting to clear it. “If you were encoding information in music,” he said, half to himself and half to Ginn, “what would the music look like?”

Ginn considered the question. “It would depend upon what the information was. What it was meant to do.”

“Let us assume that it is meant to be a program.”

“What does it run on?”

“What is it _played_ on,” Rush said, tipping his head back to gaze at the ceiling and tapping a finger against his mouth thoughtfully.

“What is it played on, then?”

“Unknown. The DHD, one assumes? But—“ He trailed off. “The frequencies that the eighth cypher utilised were not _musical_ frequencies. They weren’t intended as _pitches_. It seems odd.”

“You have the code,” Ginn said, “but not the schematics of the engine.”

“Hmm?”

“The Analytical Engine. You are attempting to divine its mechanisms by considering the nature of the code. It is harder than what Lovelace did. You must imagine the operating system that logically exists if such a piece of code has been written to run on it.”

“I _don’t_ have the code,” Rush pointed out.

But perhaps he did, in a sense. He merely had to _hear_ it. He would know, he thought. He would know when he heard the correct interpretation. Or would he know? He would not know _yet._ He was out of tune with it. The music. He could not anticipate its patterns. If he listened, if he just— _listened_ , then he would have the entire octave; it would unlock itself to him in scales and arpeggios and hierarchies of pitches that he did not know the accurate terms for. And he wanted that.

He wanted that, and yet if he listened, other things would also happen. Other possibilities would be eventuated. Did he want all of them? The instrument that is tuned is tuned for a purpose, and presumably this remains valid when it is the musician who is being tuned. He did not know the purposes of the city on that distant sunlit planet where bridges glittered over dark water and all the doors sang to him. He did not have any particular purpose and presumably to have one was better than not to, but still, still—

He was startled out of his reverie by a knock at the door. The electronic lock clicked, and Young poked his untidy head inside the room.

“Hey,” he said to Rush. “You ready to go?”

Rush shot a short glare in his direction and opted for the policy of not responding.

“If he is not your labour overseer,” Ginn said, sounding bemused, “then I do not understand the relationship between you.”

“There is no relationship between us,” Rush said sourly.

Young said, “There definitely is. I would describe it as mostly based on annoying the hell out of each other. Hey, you ate the sandwich!”

Childishly, Rush’s first impulse was to deny it, though he had demonstrably done so. He settled for squinting determinedly at the computer and saying nothing.

“Colonel Young,” Ginn said with a stiff nod of acknowledgement.

“—Lucian Alliance,” Young said a beat late, nodding back. He slouched in the open doorway, probably trying to disguise the fact that he was still on crutches. “Come on,” he said to Rush. “I already requisitioned you a computer. We’re supposed to stop by and pick it up on the way out.”

This was, regrettably, an effective form of enticement. Rush wanted a computer with internet connectivity and usable ports. He rose slowly, striving to make clear that he was in no way beholden to Young’s orders or appeased by his attempts at bribery, and slouched towards the door. “Think about the problem,” he said over his shoulder, to Ginn. “I’ll keep you informed of my own progress. And—“ He waved a distracted hand in the air. “Asymptotic analysis and so on. Yes. Later this week. _Is_ there a later this week? What day is it?”

Young audibly contained a sigh. “It’s Wednesday.”

“Well. Perhaps on Friday.”

“All right,” Ginn said, sounding uncertain. “Please spend more time consuming sandwiches. Or Jell-O. Jell-O is also topologically pleasing.”

Rush narrowed his eyes at Young. “You see what this nuclear fucking nightmare of an nineteen-fifties underground bunker has done to her?”

“I agree,” Young said to Ginn. “Jell-O is good.”

Rush shoved past Young, deliberately jostling him, and stalked outside before he could be made to articulate whatever formalities people were meant to articulate when taking leave of one another. He had never had the slightest interest in them. Gloria had always been—

He stopped and rested his forehead against the nearest wall, occasioning a question of mild concern from the sergeant, which he failed to listen to and ignored.

Gloria had always been the one who acted out the peculiar dramas that were requisite to personhood. They had drawn up a faux-contract, late one night whilst he was still a postgrad at Oxford, half in his indecipherable scribble and half in her looping script—annotated in places where she had wrenched it out of his hands, incandescent with laughter, and scored through what he had been proposing, and in others by the faintly purple partial coronas where one or both of their wineglasses had been set. _You_ must _ask people how they are when you see them_ , she’d said. _It’s simply non-negotiable._ I don’t give a damn how they are, he’d said. _You do really_ , she’d said. No, he’d said. I’m not interested. _But what if something really extraordinary’s happened to them? What if they’ve been to the Arctic, or survived Ebola?_ Do you think that’s likely? he asked. _Well, no; but you never know, do you? We must live prostrate before hope, our attitude one of submission._ He had flopped back onto the bed with a mock-groan.

He did not know why Gloria was so much on his mind.

He did know, really.

Had there been an interval when she was _not_ on his mind?

“Hey,” Young said from behind him. “You okay?”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Rush said curtly. He turned and fixed Young with a critical eye. Now that Young was out of the cell— out of view of someone whose status as a _former_ enemy he did not quite entirely accept— he looked haggard, as though the cheer had been forced. There was a thin, flattened, and brittle quality to his affect. “How was David?” Rush asked, which was not a stab in the dark so much as a bloody great swing in a room that was at best dimly lit.

A kind of spasm swept over Young’s face, muscles rebelling against the emotions that they were compelled the express. He looked away for a second, his eyes shut and his mouth twisted. “I’ll tell you about it in the car,” he said— and stumped forward on his crutches down the long cement-coloured hallway with its clashing accents of yellow-black tape.

Rush watched him go, feeling resentful and guilty— resentful that such an emotion as guilt could touch him; resentful that he breathed shallowly because of it anyways; resentful that the weight of it flattened his chest until he felt once more lightheaded; yet guilty, guilty, guilty all the same. And why? Because of fucking _Young?_ Young who wanted to be the overseer of his labour and, apparently, every-fucking-thing else? Young who was going to take David’s seat at the table, which meant— it meant that Young was going to _lose_ if he did not play the game, and if he played the game then he would learn all the for-ness and against-ness; he would learn to demand and conceal and control his emotive face, and Rush _could not_ trust him, could not sleep on his shoulder, could not eat his fucking sandwiches. Not that he _wanted_ to do those things, any more than he wanted to listen to the metallophone notes that were _almost_ ringing out in his head; that was the fucking bitch of desire, that it was not a binary prospect, and he saw the appeal of the ternary, he really did, because what it offered was a _way out_ , which was what he had always _actually_ wanted, but in the real world one had to be this thing or that thing, and the only other option seemed to be—

Dematerialisation. A different approach to the problem.

The headache he had sensed was finally settling in full-force. He swallowed dryly. But he _should_ hurt. So, there: a moral imperative: he should hurt, and he did.

Somehow it was not enough. He set off down the corridor, trailing his hand along the wall as though— despite the fact that he had walked this exact route on dozens of previous occasions— he might without warning find himself lost in a labyrinth.


	25. Chapter 25

_Earlier_

 

David was being kept in isolation, not in one of the standard rooms on base where prisoners were held. The guard outside— an earnest-faced marine, not an airman; someone Young didn’t know— checked Young’s clearance three times before he would open the door, and even then he seemed like he didn’t want to do it. Maybe he felt important, being in charge of someone who was either the base’s latest big-time banged-up hero or, a long-shot, the Lucian mole. But Jackson’s word was good, or at least it got Young inside of the stark gray cinderblocks-and-bare-wires room.

He couldn’t touch David, couldn’t even get close. A glass wall divided the room in half. On one side of that wall was Young, ironed and pressed as close as he got to neatness, feeling conspicuous as he moved from crutch to crutch. On the the other side: a rumpled cot with a stack of books beside it, and David, wearing slippers and dark blue medical scrubs.

He was sitting at the edge of the cot with his hands in his lap. He wasn’t as battered as he’d been the last time Young saw him; on a first glance, his face still looked bruised, but a second glance saw that this was just the marks of sleeplessness under his eyes, which on his complexion had always shown up like the aftermath of violence. He’d lost weight; his hair was longer; he looked— frayed around the edges, soft in ways that were appealing but suggested the faint possibility that he might be starting to come apart.

“Hey,” Young said, aching.

David looked at him without moving for a long time. “I thought you might come,” he said finally. His voice was a little rough.

“Yeah,” Young said.

“I guess I thought you’d come right away. Right after it happened. I kept waiting for you to show up. But then the more I thought about it, I figured— why would you show up. You shouldn’t.”

That stung. “I couldn’t get clearance,” Young said. “I had to have Jackson to swing it.”

“Oh, _Jackson_.” David made a dismissive gesture. “What the hell is _he_ getting out of this?”

“Nothing,” Young said. “He did it as a favor.”

“I’m sure that’s what he told you.”

“He didn’t, actually.”

Though now that Young thought about it, he couldn’t exactly remember. He’d told Jackson he wanted to see David, and Jackson had made it clear that he’d try, and that it wasn’t a trade for Young’s allegiance on the Icarus Project. So maybe he had, in fact, said it in a subtler way. Was Jackson like that? Was it politics all the time? Young found the idea exhausting. He didn’t want to have to weigh up every moment of his existence as some microtransaction in a silent stock market that was all-encompassing.

David seemed to read his thoughts and smiled tightly.

Frustrated, Young shook his head. “Can you just—“

“What?” David returned sharply, too fast. “Can I just what? My sphere of action is a little, uh, limited at the moment.” He indicated the confines of the room: the bare walls, the unappealing cot, the stack of books. “It’s like I’m a goddamn prisoner, like they think I _did_ something, I mean, aside from monumentally fucking up, which, last I checked, they at least didn’t throw you in the brig for.”

“Can you just tell me if you’re okay?” Young whispered. He hadn’t intended for it to be a whisper, but that was how it came out. He wanted to say that of course David wasn’t a prisoner, of course David hadn’t fucked up, but the truth was that he had and halfway was. But they had all, all of them, fucked up. That was how they’d gotten in this situation.

David closed his eyes and shoved his hands in his hair. It was growing out to that glossy length that invited touch. With the strange duality that he always felt now when it came to David, Young both did and didn’t want to touch it. He wanted to touch it, but his hands did not want to. He hadn’t known that a person could be split in half like that.

At last David said, sounding defeated, “I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m in fucking prison, for Christ’s sake, or I might as well be in prison; I got my team killed—“

“Reynolds and Ramirez are okay,” Young said. “I’m sure they told you that already.”

“Are they?” David lifted his gaze and looked at Young with that piercing singularity of intent. “ _Are_ they okay?”

Young sighed and let himself lean on his crutches. “I don’t know. Probably not.”

“And what the fuck happened to _you?_ ” Suddenly David was up and pacing restlessly from one wall to the other, looking jerky-limbed in the blue scrubs. “No, wait— don’t tell me. You went off on some stupid rescue mission that you had no business being on, that you weren’t prepared for, because for some goddamn reason you always feel like you’ve got something to prove—“

“Yeah,” Young said loudly. “Yes. Thank you for that astute psychological interpretation, coming from someone who definitely never feels like he’s got anything to prove—“

“Yeah, well, I didn’t get my _back broken_ —“

“They cut a goddamn Lucian insignia into you when they twigged to you being undercover, let alone whatever the fuck they did to you this time; what did they do to you this time, David? Huh?”

“ _Nothing_ ,” David bit out savagely— like Young hadn’t seen him beaten and haggard and broken-shouldered, screaming on the gateroom floor. But then his jaw tightened and he seemed to regain a measure of control. He said, “They did nothing. I mean, I think they did nothing; that’s what I’m in here to find out, right? Whether or not they shot me up with their magic brainwashing juice? Because I wouldn’t know, would I? If they did?”

Young didn’t say anything.

“I _wouldn’t know_ ,” David said. His voice was brittle. “That’s how thin the line is, between being you and being— _someone else_ ; you can cross it and not even know, not till later, like you’re a fucking kid with a piece of sidewalk chalk, drawing maps of your neighborhood, pictures of your family, and every time it rains you go out and try to find where they were, and they’re _gone_ , and you didn’t even notice when it was happening. I mean, Christ, Everett. Christ. How are we all not fucking crazy?”

He was standing close to the glass, rubbing his face with a hand.

“I know,” Young said. He was close to the glass too. He thought that if he touched it, David would touch it back, covering the glass where he could see Young’s hand; something about the worn-down desperation in David’s expression suggested that he would, and that maybe he was even waiting for Young to do it. But part of Young didn’t want that at all, maybe remembering what David had said in all those neatly typed transcripts. _I’ve found a better candidate_ , he had said. _If that’s what it takes, then yes._ “I do know.”

David shook his head. After a moment’s hesitation, he folded back onto the cot. “They told me you took my project.”

“It’s supposed to be temporary. Just till they clear you.”

David gave him a short smile. “You don’t really believe that. Jackson wants me out.”

“Jackson’s not in charge of the project.”

“No. That’s why he pulled you in.”

“I’m not on Jackson’s side,” Young said.

“No?” A skeptical eyebrow. “Come on. Deep down, you’ve always been one of the bleeding-hearts.”

That hurt, for some reason— maybe because Young had the sudden image of himself, clumsy after sex and stupid-faced, probably, sprawled out on David’s unpleasant and expensive sheets, drinking a beer and pretending to watch late-night television while really at the very periphery of his vision his attention was caught by the golden expanse of David’s stretched-out limbs. His whole body had felt weirdly liquid at those moments, like only a barrier thinner than skin let it keep its shape, and he’d thought that if David reached out and touched him even with one fingertip, it would split him like a dyke and he would spring a leak. But he’d wanted that. Do it, he’d thought with a kind of desperation. Do it. Every cell in his body seemed to hold its breath. At the same time, he’d been scared of David seeing that shapelessness in him, scared that David could crack Young’s mind open as he’d cracked open the shell of his bodily desires, and expose him as something soft, weak, unstony, and at risk of penetration, something pitiable and repellant to be crushed underfoot.

While David refused to be crushed. He had said that, too, in the transcripts. He would do whatever it took not to be crushed.

“I’m on no one’s side,” Young said. “I’m on Rush’s side.”

“ _Rush’s_ side?” David looked astonished. Then his face changed. “Oh, Jesus Christ, you’re not—?”

“ _No_ ,” Young said. He could feel his face flushing.

“Is he still living with you?”

“No.” Then, thinking of the groceries in his fridge and the t-shirt on his bedroom floor, Young felt his mouth twist. “Sort of.”

“It was a mistake to leave him there. I should’ve gotten him out that night; I never should’ve gone with SG-3.”

“You asked him,” Young said curtly. “He said no.”

“Yeah, well, Nick doesn’t always know what’s good for him. As I’m sure you’ve discovered.”

There was something in the wry, weary set of his face for a second that Young recognized. “You like him,” he said, astonished.

David shrugged, his shoulders hunching, almost defensive. “Of course I like him.”

“How? How can you possibly like him? How can you like him and still—?” Young gestured towards all of the things that were in the transcripts: the secrecy, the lab, the cost-benefit analysis, the injections and the electricity, remodeling the circuitry of someone’s brain.

“Oh, I don’t know. How does anybody like anybody?” David raked a hand through his hair. “Would it be better if I didn’t like him?”

“I don’t know. Yes. Maybe.”

“ _No,_ ” David said fiercely. “It would not make a difference. All it would do is let you and Jackson stand on your high ground and feel better about me. Like I could only want to do all of this if I didn’t know any better, if I wasn’t _sensitive_ enough to understand how special a person Rush is. The French have a word for that, you know. _S_ _ensibilité_. That oh-so-elevated viewpoint. That inner feeling. All the educated emotions appropriate to a capital-m Man. It’d be so easy for you if I’d just be stupid. Like all-American Cam Mitchell, tossing back a football and some beers.”

The bitterness surprised Young. “Mitchell’s a good guy,” he said.

David laughed, sounding weary. “Yeah,” he said. “Thank you. Yes. A good guy. That’s exactly what he is. And if he came to Jackson and said what I’d been saying, Jackson would think to himself, Mitchell means well, but he’s just a big dumb flyboy. Let me put together a twenty-two-part Powerpoint lecture, and when he learns his lesson, he’ll agree with me. But when I go to Jackson—“

“He doesn’t like you,” Young said.

“I fuck with his worldview,” David said. He let his head tip back and rest against the cinderblock wall. “Stuck in this goddamn cell, reading Dostoevsky. He wishes he could keep me locked away underground.”

Young didn’t know what to say to that. “Jesus, are you really reading Dostoevsky? I thought you took that book to mess with me.”

David smiled, a quick curve of his mouth that was appealing. “I took it to mess with you a little.”

“Asshole.”

“Why the hell do you even own that book?”

Young shrugged. “Won it in high school. It was a prize in a speech and debate competition. I talked about what it means to be a citizen.”

“You did, huh?”

“Wore a suit and tie and everything.”

David lowered his eyes. His eyelashes formed two dark crescents against his face. “So tell me,” he said. “What’s it mean to be a citizen?”

Young laughed. “Hell if I know.”

“ _That’s_ your answer? For _that_ they gave you a book?”

“Maybe I was supposed to read the book and figure it out.”

“But you never read it,” David said.

“Never got around to it. I kept it; dragged it all over the goddamn world, figuring one day…”

“…One day,” David repeated, like an echo.

“So don’t spoil it for me, okay? I don’t want to know how it ends.”

David smiled, but this time the smile was humorless. His eyes were still fixed on the floor. “I don’t really think it’s that kind of book.”

Young studied him. He felt like he had asked the wrong question. For a second, he and David had been synchronized, but now David was gone again, withdrawn behind whatever solid partition he’d always used to keep Young out. Young felt that sick sinking in his stomach again, like he didn’t want to be in the room with David. He swallowed hard. “Still,” he said. “If you finish it before me—“

David huffed out a sound like a laugh. “Young, Satan himself is going to go ice-skating on the rink of hell before you read that book.”

“Hey,” Young said, trying to sound offended.

David lifted his eyes at last. His gaze, where it settled on Young, was searching. In that moment, for some stupid reason, Young couldn’t stop noticing that David’s face was heart-shaped. It had occurred to him before, but he had always made himself dismiss the thought, because men’s faces couldn’t be heart-shaped. It was a feminine way of thinking, a feminine way of looking at the world. Now, looking at David’s delicate chin, his neat, sharp cheekbones, he wondered how he could have thought that there was something gentle about the heart, or that it couldn’t belong to men. It was edged, like a knife. It was made to cut you. Part of him still wanted to hold the heart of David’s face in his hands, but if he did, he thought, he knew what would happen.

David seemed to read the thought in Young’s eyes. He looked away, his mouth tightening. “I should’ve taken Rush out of there,” he said, almost to himself. “That night. I should never have let you get involved.”

“I was already involved,” Young pointed out gently.

“I know,” David said. He closed his eyes, as though the words caused him pain. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“Are you—“ David opened his eyes and indicated the crutches. “Are you going to be okay?”

Young tightened his hands around the grips. “Working on it.”

David nodded. “That’s good.” But he didn’t seem happy. All the energy had gone out of him. “Say hi to Nick for me, will you? Tell him to take a goddamn nap.”

It was a dismissal. Young tried to smile. “I will. And when you get out of here, you can, uh—“ He trailed off. He hadn’t started the sentence with a clear idea of what he’d hoped to suggest.

“Yeah,” David said softly, looking away.

For some reason, Young took a halting step forward, bringing himself almost into contact with the glass. “You’re still my friend,” he said. “You know that, right? I thought you were dead. I thought you weren’t coming back. I would’ve missed you, you son of a bitch.”

He wasn’t sure if the words had penetrated that wall— not the glass wall, but the other one, the security perimeter of whatever inner place David went. David’s expression didn’t change. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

Young stood there for a moment longer, awkwardly, and then, when David didn’t look up at him, he left.

* * *

_Now_

 

Young had promised Rush a description of his meeting with David, but both of them were quiet in the car.

As they pulled into the parking lot of the apartment complex, Young’s phone buzzed. He checked it and saw a text from Emily: _Green hyacinth teapot?_ It was the second text she’d sent in two days. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to get in touch with her, for reasons he couldn’t explain to himself or understand.

Rush was looking at him, so he said tersely, “Ex-wife.”

Rush didn’t say anything.

Young parked the truck under its tin-roof canopy and turned the engine off. But he didn’t get out, and neither did Rush. They sat there in silence, not looking at each other.

“David says hi,” Young said at last. “He’s reading Dostoevsky.”

Rush made a quiet sound of amusement. “Of course he is. Pretentious wanker.”

“Hot talk coming from someone who once spent an hour trying to explain _terroir_ to me.”

Rush made a airy gesture of dismissal.

“Yeah, yeah,” Young said. “What would _you_ be reading?

“Something even more pretentious, I’m sure,” Rush said. “Just to piss you off.”

The corner of his mouth had turned up, but Young thought he wasn’t joking. “You and David understand each other pretty well,” he said.

“Yes,” Rush said. He looked down at his hands, folded loosely in his lap.

Young tried to figure out what he wanted to say. “Be careful,” he said finally.

“Why?” Rush asked, too fast.

“You know I can’t—“

“You can’t tell me. Yes, yes.” Rush looked away, as though disgusted. “Allegiance above all else. The uniform as moral imperative.”

“I just—“ Young said, and stopped. He felt so tired all of a sudden. Or maybe on the brink of tears, which was nuts, because he didn’t cry, of course; he hadn’t cried in— years, at least, if not decades; the last time he could remember was when he’d been thrown from a horse that’d gotten spooked by a gopher and broken his arm, when he was thirteen. “I— You know I went to rescue him, right? I can’t— I can’t really tell you too much about that, either. It was supposed to be SG-1’s mission, but I wanted to go. We were already pretty much over at that point. My wife had found out. But I couldn’t just not go. So that was— I mean, that was when I— I’m saying this, I guess, so you know that I’d never tell you not to trust him. You can trust him to be who and what he is. And maybe what he is is a lot like you in some ways; I don’t know, really. But sometimes that’s what other people want to protect you from. They want to protect you from yourself. Not because of some huge conspiracy to— deprive you of your liberty, or whatever, but because they’re the ones who stand to lose whatever it is they give a shit about enough to try to protect, the thing you can’t see from inside you, the really important thing, and you’re just— throwing it away.” He attempted a smile to disguise the fact that his voice had wavered. “What that might be in your case, I don’t know, since God knows you’ve got no redeeming qualities, but. You know. Just something to keep in mind, maybe.”

Rush stared fixedly at the dashboard in silence.

Young could hear wind rattling in the leaves of the trees overhead, a full-bodied shiver through the long drape of willows.

“Well,” Rush said at last. “That was predictably incoherent.”

“Yeah,” Young said resignedly. “Thanks.”

He reached for the door handle to get out of the truck, but was stopped by Rush’s hand on his opposite wrist: a hard circle that he couldn’t quite make sense of.

“You’ve got scallops in your freezer,” Rush said in a tense and determinedly expressionless voice. “I doubt you lack the sophistication to recognize what they are, much less make any use of them."

Young studied him.

Rush wouldn’t meet his gaze. He still looked, for the most part, pretty terrible, though not as bad as he had that morning, when he’d opened the door and Young had thought, Shit. Then, Rush had been brittle, white-faced, thin, and manic, like he was either going to start climbing the walls or shake himself completely apart. Now he just seemed about as tired as Young, and desperately lonely.

“Yeah,” Young said. “I’m sure you’re right.”

“I could—“

“Yeah,” Young said. “If you wanted to.”

“I don’t trust you,” Rush said— devoid of emotion, a plain statement of fact.

Young looked down at where Rush was still holding his wrist: with just thumb and forefinger, the barest minimum of contact. “I know,” he said. “Are you going to poison my scallops?”

The response seemed not to be what Rush had expected. His mouth twitched. “Perhaps I haven’t decided,” he said. “So few poisons pair well with a blanc de blanc. I’d have to be certain that the sacrifice of the flavor profile was worth it.”

“Right. Well, how about you think on it a little longer,” Young said, “and maybe we can try to go from there.”

Rush released his wrist, leaving behind a faint and slowly-disappearing finger-mark. “I’ll take it under advisement,” he said.

* * *

Rush kept it under advisement long enough to defrost the scallops, juice Young’s remaining apples and a grapefruit by hand, dig through the cabinets for something called lecithin, which sounded like it ought to be a brand of cough syrup, and brew a bunch of weird-smelling green things in a pot for what he said was going to be a cold soup.

“Soup isn’t supposed to be cold,” Young said. He was leaning against the kitchen island, drinking the fizzy white wine that was the only beverage option Rush had ruled appropriate for the meal. “By definition.”

Rush didn’t look up from the pot. “You’re exposing your lack of both education and culture.”

“Are the apples going in the soup?”

“It’s not a fucking smoothie. I’m turning the apples into foam.”

“Ah,” Young said. “Obviously. Foam.”

“Don’t pretend to understand the intricacies of my cooking.”

“Oh, I definitely don’t understand.” Young took another sip of the wine. “Actually, there are a lot of things I’d say I’m having trouble understanding, one of them being why I’m standing in my kitchen drinking a wine for girls while an angry Scotsman cooks me food that isn’t actually food.”

“‘A wine for girls,’” Rush repeated disdainfully.

“Come on.” Young raised his glass, letting the orange light of sunset catch the small bubbles in his glass. “I mean, wine to start with, even— but this is, like, the kind of wine that gets called shit like ‘Cupcake,’ or ‘Miranda,’ or ‘Pink Kiss.’”

Rush didn’t turn. “Do you not like it?”

Young considered. “No; it’s fine.”

“I would wager that it is, in fact, more than fine. I would wager that it is delicious. I make this wager on the grounds that I have an exceptionally well-educated palate.”

“Yeah, but. I’m just saying.” Young took another sip to cover for his inability to explain something that seemed so obvious a fact. He settled, in the end, on deflecting. “I guess I didn’t think Scottish guys were big on wine. I thought it was all beer and kilts and hitting things and yelling.”

Rush paused in the act of reaching for one of his kitchen contraptions. “Yes,” he said. “I’m sure you did think that.”

“So how come you—“

Young’s phone rang before he could finish the question. He sighed and fumbled for it in his pocket, then sighed again when he checked the caller ID. “Hey, Emily,” he said. He wished it had been Mitchell, calling to report that the Lucian Alliance had infiltrated the Mountain.

“Everett,” Emily’s voice said. “So you haven’t actually been killed in a top-secret alien attack that the government covered up, which, for obvious reasons, was my first assumption when you didn’t return any of my emails or texts.”

“Uh— no.” Young turned around, trying futilely to hide all evidence of the call from Rush. “No; I’m still here.”

“Still here as in still here at your apartment?” She didn’t seem that surprised or that excited to find out he was still alive, which led him to suspect she’d known he was just avoiding her messages.

“Yeah,” Young said.

“With my grandmother’s green teapot?”

“Uh—“ Young put the phone to his chest and said over his shoulder, “Rush, have you seen a green teapot?”

Rush, who was sautéing onions, eyed him with naked curiosity. “Upper left cabinet.”

“Yeah,” Young said into the phone.

“Who is ‘Rush?’” Emily asked.

“Nobody.”

“Why does he know where my teapot is?”

“Doesn’t matter. Listen—“

“I’m in the neighborhood,” Emily said. “I’m going to stop by and pick it up, since it turns out you’re at home and alive.”

“Oh,” Young said lamely. “Okay.”

“Unless I’m interrupting something.”

“No, not— I mean, I’m having dinner with someone, but it’s—“

“So I am interrupting something.”

“ _No_ ,” Young said. He could hear the insinuation in her voice. “Not like— you know what, it’s fine. Just— call when you get here.”

“Everett—“

He hit the button to the end the call.

When he turned, Rush was holding a spatula and facing him, arms folded and back to the stove.

“My, uh—“ Young said.

“Yes,” Rush said. “I gathered.”

“She’s coming over to pick up the teapot.”

“Should I go?”

“No,” Young said, and was surprised to find how much he meant it. He had missed Rush. The quickness of him, the sharpness, needling and incisive, and even the low-level grumbling, like a little engine running in a corner of the room. And the food smelled good. “But— she’s gonna think you’re sleeping with me. You know that, right?”

Rush shrugged minutely.

“That doesn’t bother you?”

Rush studied Young with a difficult-to-read expression. “It bothers _her_ ,” he said. “That you like men.”

“I don’t _like men_ ,” Young said, rubbing at his forehead as though trying to erase the beginnings of a headache. “I’m not—“

“—someone who drinks white wine,” Rush supplied.

“Yes. No,” Young said, aware that he was still holding the glass of white wine. “She’s not— I mean, she’s a very tolerant person. Really. So even if it were that— But it’d just be easier for her if I’d had an affair with my secretary, I guess, or, you know, something that—“

Rush said neutrally, “— something that men do.”

“Can you just—“ Young said, and then didn’t know what to say. His hand was still pressed to his head. He felt as though he were trying to hold something in, something fighting to escape. “I made it hard for her,” he said finally, tired. “She didn’t understand. She has a right to be angry.”

“I suppose.”

“You can go, if you want.”

“No,” Rush said. He turned to face the stove. “Do you want _her_ to stay?” he asked a moment later, over his shoulder.

“No,” Young said, frowning. “Why would I—“

“I thought perhaps— if your goal was to repair your marriage.”

Young shook his head and didn’t say anything for a moment. He stared down at the counter of the kitchen island, the hair-thin lines of its marble swirls. “No,” he said. “That’s not the goal.”

Rush nodded.

Young only noticed they’d fallen into silence some time later, when Rush flipped a switch and a handheld blender was suddenly humming in the soup-pot. Interested and a little alarmed— as he always was whenever Rush got ahold of sharp objects— Young boosted himself up on his elbows, trying to get a look. He could see a foamy green liquid that looked like pesto, but presumably wasn’t. Rush had turned the stovetop light on; outside the windows, the sun was falling into dark, and the apartment was full of that warm defensive light you sometimes got around sundown, when indoor spaces seemed to be trying to stake their territory against the night. Rush had a towel over his shoulder, and his green shirt was rumpled. The color of the light made his hair look his hair look bronze. He set aside the mixer, and stirred the soup with a wooden spoon. It was domestic, the whole scene— the bluish dusk outside the windows, the glow of the lamps, the pots and pans, the towel, and Rush— and a sharp pang went through Young, like he’d been impaled by something.

He must’ve made a noise, because Rush turned slightly, eyebrows raised, and said, “Hmm?”

“Nothing,” Young said.

But it wasn’t nothing. He considered, as though from a distance, the unfamiliar feeling. He thought it might have been happiness.

* * *

Emily didn’t call till she was actually standing outside the apartment, probably because she thought that Young, if given the chance, would manage to come up with some kind of excuse to flee the apartment altogether. Young reflected guiltily that the idea wasn’t entirely unfair. He’d always thought that if he didn’t see her, didn’t talk to her, he could postpone her entirely, like he’d actually made her disappear. He had _wanted_ to make her disappear. That was the worst part.

And it was hard to make Emily disappear. She came into the apartment like a strong wind that had swept straight through the makeup counters at Nordstrom: immaculate, strongly-scented, and glinting at every angle. Her hair was lacquered in place, her eyebrows were perfect, her earrings were pearls, and her necklace was made of turquoise glass. As ever, Young was slightly awed by the amount of effort it took to be her. He’d had no idea before they’d gotten married— all the complicated tools, the skills, the patience, the arrays of brushes and tiny jars. In a way, it had convinced him of how amazing she was as a woman. It seemed that she had mastered a difficult art, and that this alone ought to qualify her for a life better than what he could give her. This had also seemed to mean that he should want her, should feel that he’d won by getting her, and so he had. He did.

“Oh, Everett,” she said, and looked down at where Young was leaning on his crutches. “What did you do to yourself this time?”

“—Nothing,” Young said. “It’s just a little setback. Nothing serious.”

“I hope not. You didn’t spend all that time in rehab just for this.”

She had really helped, in rehab. He thought now that she had stuck with him partly so that she would be seen to stick with him, because otherwise she would be the woman who had failed to do so, and she never failed at anything she did. But at the time it hadn’t mattered whether her support was artificial. She had been there to laugh and cheer and clap when he went a step further. She had given him what he needed; more than he deserved. But now he supposed his needs were different, and it rubbed against him that she would say _just for this_ , like he was disappointing her on some existential level.

“Well,” he said. “It’s classified. Uh— you should meet Rush. He’s a friend from work.”

Rush had been standing behind the kitchen island with an air of inscrutable and suspicious politeness. He stepped forward when Young said his name. He hadn’t taken the towel off his shoulder, and it drew Young’s attention unpleasantly now: seeming too intimate, too _much_.

“Hello,” Rush said with every appearance of pleasantness. He extended his hand. “Nicholas Rush.”

“Emily Yoder,” Emily said. Her hand brushed against Rush’s very briefly.

“We were just enjoying quite a good California blanc de blanc,” Rush said. His accent had somehow, ever-so-subtly, receded. “If you’d like to join us. I’m afraid dinner isn’t ready; the soup is still chilling.”

Young said awkwardly, “Rush, uh, cooks.”

“For my sins,” Rush said. “I’m seasoning some scallops at the moment. Frozen, alas, not fresh; it’s a bit early for the season. Although I don’t suppose you get fresh scallops in Colorado. If you go to the Cape in winter, you can buy them straight from the bucket, pulled out of the water that day. But I'm sure the Midwest has its charms.”

“Colorado’s… not really the Midwest,” Young said. He was trying not to stare at Rush, who was radiating a kind of contemptuous grace and wearing a remote, affected smile.

“Isn’t it?” Rush shrugged in a way that communicated that it couldn’t possibly be of the slightest interest to him whether or not Colorado was the Midwest. “Excuse me. I’m afraid I have to see to the scallops.”

He retreated to the stovetop, leaving Emily staring after him as he went.

“Rush is,” Young said, and then wasn’t sure how to characterize Rush. “—A mathematician.”

“Oh,” Emily said.

“I should— oh, I’ve got your teapot.” It was sitting on the kitchen island, next to his wine glass. He limped over to it and, abandoning his crutches, seized it like a talisman. “Sorry. It got mixed in, and then Rush did most of the unpacking, so I didn’t realize. It’s been a little bit busy around here.”

Emily took the teapot from him. The pink polish on her nails almost perfectly matched the color of the painted hyacinths, and Young wondered if she had done that on purpose. He had never known or understood the rituals and expectations that to her were obvious necessities, facts; he had felt himself grow stupider as he tried to navigate her world, where he did not know the rules and could not do the right things. He had wanted to know when they would get to the part of the world that he was good at, but it never seemed to happen. Gradually he had come to accept that perhaps he was simply no good.

He had wanted to be good, he thought. Good at something. But he had lacked some necessary talent for everything he tried. It had taken him a long time to wonder if there might be things he wasn't trying.

And then he blinked, and considered the possibility that he had never, in fact, wondered this.

“Thanks,” Emily said to him, and stepped back. A slight frown had appeared on her face; she looked at him as though puzzled.

“No problem,” Young said. “You sure you don’t want a glass of wine? It’s actually, uh— kind of good.”

Her eyes lingered on his half-drunk glass of white wine with the same perplexed expression. “No,” she said. “Thanks. I should get going.”

Young led her to the door.

“It was lovely to meet you!” Rush called from the stove. Emily managed a faint smile in his direction.

“Thanks for coming by,” Young said. “I… won’t ignore your messages next time. Promise.”

She was still smiling that little shadow of a smile. “It’s fine,” she said. “I get it. You’re busy. I’m busy. Take care of yourself, Everett.”

“Yeah,” he said.

He closed the door while she was still standing there, looking at him. He felt he had closed out another whole part of the world, much larger than Emily, and that it was just him and Rush now, in this private landscape, and that it was a relief that it was just him and Rush. He let out a long breath.

“These scallops are going to retreat to the fucking Atlantic if you insist on dithering any longer,” Rush said. “Which would serve you right, since I frankly doubt you’re capable of appreciating the sophistication of my balsamic grapefruit air.”

Young covered his mouth with a hand for a moment. He'd thought that seeing Emily would upset him. But he was smiling. “Well,” he said. “I would hate to miss out on some really good air.”

* * *

Incredibly, Rush managed to get the food on the table and the wineglasses topped up before he started in on the questions. He even spread a napkin in his lap, with the air of a man armoring himself for battle. Young sighed and picked up his fork.

“So,” Rush said.

Young ate a determined spoonful of soup. It was very green, and very cold. “Mm.”

“Emily.”

“Yeah.”

Rush seemed to feel as though the name itself ought to be sufficient as a question, which— in a way— perhaps it was. He arched an eyebrow.

Young set his spoon down again and tangled a hand in his hair. “She was,” he said, defeated. “—Uh. Very good a being a wife.”

“I don’t doubt that she was.”

“Really— just really, um, competent.”

“You sound as though you hired her from a temp agency.” Rush said. He paused. “Come to think of it, that would be remarkably consistent with her appearance.”

“We met when we were at school in Laramie,” Young said. He stared into his soup bowl. “She just always seemed— like everything I’d imagined. When I thought about the future. About having a wife. So. Yeah. Maybe. A showroom, I guess. And I was—“

“Captain of the football team?” Rush suggested, his glass halfway to his mouth.

“Are you kidding? No way. I was a little bit of a cowboy, which, maybe that was _her_ idea of— but I don’t think I was what she wanted, either. This big awkward tongue-tied kid from the country whose idea of fun was going backcountry. I joined the Air Force, and she liked being an Air Force wife all right, but…” He trailed off.

“But,” Rush said.

“Yeah.” Young ate a scallop. “These are good,” he said. “Really good. I even like the air.” It wasn’t air, really; more like a light foam. It did taste noticeably of grapefruit.

Rush fixed him with a dissatisfied look.

“Oh, what? It’s not like I’m the only one who’s full of surprises. Who was that guy I introduced Emily to in there? Cause it definitely wasn’t _you_.”

The look became an expression of polite incomprehension. Rush neatly bisected and ate a scallop.

“Uh, the _Cape?_  " Young said. "If someone boiled down the world’s most condescending cocktail party and distilled its essence, it’d sound pretty much exactly like you. Which, except for the ‘condescending’ part, isn’t exactly your usual MO.”

“Yes, well.” Rush stared at his wineglass, absenting turning the stem between two fingers. “I used to go to a great many cocktail parties.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

A shrug: a small one, a hitch of Rush’s shoulders. His hand clenched around the wineglass. He looked away. “I,” he said. It seemed for a long moment that he would stop there, abandon the sentence and refuse the topic, as Rush sometimes tended to do. But he didn’t. Instead he said, after an interval in which the air seemed stretched out like spun sugar, as thin as it could get and at risk of collapse, “My wife was a concert violinist. Quite a good one. It comes with the territory.”

“Ah,” Young said quietly.

“She,” Rush said, and then again halted. “She was quite wealthy. She had been born into it: minor aristocrats round for Sunday dinner, Nobel prize winners arguing with her parents over tea. So it was easy for her.” He was touching the space on his left hand where he’d once worn a ring. Young had noticed the absence, but hadn’t wanted to ask how he’d lost it. If he’d lost it, or just— taken it off, and if so, what had changed.

“It was easy for Emily, too,” Young said.

Rush shook his head, but didn’t explain what he was objecting to. “She wasn’t like that,” he said at last, tersely. “She— My— She was interested in beauty. It was an art to her, like any other art. Like playing an instrument. It wasn’t important, but a person could learn to do it beautifully. A person could choose to do it well.”

“So why don’t you?” Young asked, before he could stop himself.

Rush’s voice was flat. "Why don’t I what?”

Young felt at the edge of the demilitarized zone they had carved out, and straying very close to the place where the minefields began. “You can. Do it well. I mean, you sort of can, it seems like? But you… don’t.”

Rush leveled a suddenly hostile stare at him. “Why the fuck should I?”

“Cause it makes things easier? Cause— I don’t know— maybe people would like you? Which, again…” Young made an uncomfortable gesture. “Makes things easier.”

“I don’t give a _fuck_ if people like me.” Rush shoved himself to his feet in an abrupt and jerky motion, causing the dishes on the table to rattle. “There is no one on this earth, or any other fucking planet, whom I have the least fucking interest in, or whose interest I have the least fucking interest in attracting. The extremely limited engagement of this particular performance is over. _Exeunt omnes._ ”

“Rush—“ Young tried to interject. He had also stood.

“And as for _easier_ — I fail to understand how you could have received the impression that _easy_ is a quality I find appealing. What was it that your country's absurd upper-class president said? ‘We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’ He, of course, didn’t understand the reason; he was like David: we climb Mount Everest because it’s there. But that _isn’t_ it; that’s _not_ the reason. The reason— the reason is, succeed or fail at the easy things, it doesn’t fucking matter.” Rush’s voice was fast and nervous, unsteady. He was gripping the back of the chair. “You can fail all your life, sinking an inch at a time into some unseen, paralyzing, indifferent morass; and the entirety of that life will pass you by, and it will never have occurred to you in the midst of your pathetic sinking to ponder the one question that matters, the only _real_ question: _what else, if not this?_ That’s the difficult thing, not the fucking mountain— the idea that life might be possible up there, in the ice, on the peaks, a different kind of life than exists down in the valleys, not a better life but a _difficult_ life, the _what else_ you turned your back to—

“ _Rush_ ,” Young said again. He had rounded the table.

“You and your _easy_ fucking life that admits no alternative options, sleeping every night in a fucking bed at the same time, your cheap catalog crockery and your paint-by-numbers decor and your clinically-diagnosable anxiety-about-the-state-of-your-American-manhood couch, your rote allegiances to mediocre generals and your little GI Joe ribbons, using your uniform as a simple excuse to cut off any inconvenient fucking pieces of yourself, like a fucking _biscuit cutter_ , which you don’t even _own_ , by the way, though you own fucking _table napkins_ , Christ—“ Rush seized one of the napkins off the table and, cramming it into his fist, hurled it at Young.

It drifted open as it fell, revealing its pattern of surprised-looking chickens.

Young looked at it. The corner of his mouth twitched. “Rush,” he said.

“What,” Rush said, sounding defeated. He had dropped his head, and had his hands pressed up under his glasses, covering his eyes.

“I only bought the goddamn napkins in the first place because you threw such a fit.”

“Yes, well—“ Rush removed one hand to make a weary, incomprehensible gesture.

“Yeah,” Young said. “ _Yes, well_ is pretty much what I figured.” He’d gotten good at recognizing when Rush was being difficult for the sake of being difficult. He opted not to make a big deal out of it now. Instead, cautiously, he moved a step closer. “What else?”

“What?”

“You said— that’s the question I’m not asking. So I’m asking.” Young shrugged and spread his arms. “What else?”

“I don’t know,” Rush said. His shoulders were slumped. “I don’t know what the way out is.”

“I think it bears repeating that not everything is part of some huge conspiracy to lock you up.”

“I know.” Rush let his hands drop. He blinked at Young. He looked exhausted. “Not everything is part of some looming threat to your masculinity. Whilst we’re issuing enlightening maxims.”

Young attempted a smile. "Well," he said, “the couch ought to be able to take a bullet or two for me, anyways. According to you.”

He was making light of it, but he didn’t see how Rush could fail to understand that he, himself, Rush, was the threat: standing there so warm and tired in his rumpled, green, and buttoned-crooked shirt, with the shadow of a bruise still showing on his face and his hair haphazardly shoved behind his ears. Young had been right when he’d sat on the couch with Rush asleep on his shoulder and thought that Rush wasn’t a threat, but that was exactly what made Rush a threat. Young had no defenses ready against him. Worse. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t fight; his hands wanted to touch Rush in a way that would render him more-than-defenseless. He could not let himself imagine what that way might be. Or couldn’t imagine at all. What he’d had with David, or even with Emily, whatever it’d been, it hadn’t been that.

“I don’t know why you’re looking so fucking gutted,” Rush said. “That was quite a good joke, by your standards.”

Young huffed out a laugh, in spite of the fact that he _felt_ halfway-gutted and had all evening, not in a way that was necessarily bad or even painful, but just like someone had pulled open his ribcage to get a really good look at the inside of him. “I don’t know how the hell you can claim I only like things that are easy,” he said. “Considering that I put up with you.”

Rush’s face did something strange, torn between two expressions, neither of which Young could read. He sucked in a breath as though he were going to say something, but didn’t.

On impulse, and without thinking about it much before he actually opened his mouth, Young said, “Do you want to maybe take the day off tomorrow and go somewhere? Not to the Mountain. Denver, maybe. Get out of this neck of the woods for a while."

Rush stared at him, looking even confused and even more like he was struggling to decide how he ought to feel. “What?”

“Like a day trip.” Young shifted, feeling self-conscious now that he’d said it, like he’d proposed something really stupid. “Just— you know— for fun.”

“Fun,” Rush echoed in bemusement. “You do realize that _I don’t trust you_.”

“Yeah,” Young said. “I remember. You said. But you didn’t poison me, so I’m not going to run you off the road or something.”

“You mean I haven’t poisoned you _yet_.”

“So postpone it another day, and we can drive up to Denver.”

Rush looked indecisive. He was probably flipping through some Rolodex of reasons he used for getting out of things that he’d actually enjoy if he gave them a chance.

“Maybe this is your what-else,” Young said, before Rush could manage to settle on one of those reasons.

“Excuse me?”

“Something hard to do that you’d like if you tried it.”

Rush pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m fairly certain I wasn’t referring to going road-tripping through central Colorado whilst listening to country and western music, eating Big Macs.”

“I know you weren’t.” Young shrugged. “Still.”

“Fine.” Rush pursed his lips, wearing a sour expression. “I will indulge you in this absurd activity exactly once. Any attempts to exceed this limit will be classified as kidnapping.”

“Good to know,” Young said. “I’ll keep the duct tape on hand.”

Rush leveled an unimpressed look at him. “Go eat your fucking scallops,” he said.

“And my air. Don’t forget the air,” Young said. But he returned to his seat.

Rush bent to pick up his table napkin, and then he too took his seat again.

He and Young looked at each other across the table for a long moment before abruptly lowering their gazes to the food.

* * *

When they were done eating, Rush said, fidgeting with nervous energy, “I suppose I should—“ He gestured jerkily towards the door.

“—Sure,” Young said, because he couldn’t really think of a decent reason for Rush to stay. “I can take care of the dishes, if you need to work, or— sleep, hopefully—“

Rush made a disgusted sound. “Forgive me if I doubt your ability to responsibly care for my dishes.”

“How are they _your dishes?_ ” Young asked.

Rush scowled at him. “How are they _not_ my dishes?”

“The Air Force paid for them; they’re in _my kitchen_ —“

“You lack either the skill or the aesthetic education to use them,” Rush said, as though this settled the question.

Young rolled his eyes. “You know, you can’t just insult people and act like you’ve won an argument.”

“I retract my offer to leave,” Rush said. “I no longer feel safe leaving my dishes with you; you’ll only attempt to clean them and prove my point.”

“Why do I feel like I’m being bullied into letting you do my dishes?” Young, feeling somewhat harried, scratched his head. “Do the goddamn dishes! Stay! You should just stay over; we can get an early start in the morning.” He avoided looking at Rush; he felt like his face was hot, for no reason.

The weight of Rush’s scrutiny rested upon him. “Sleep on the sofa, you mean,” Rush said.

“Yeah. Yes. Sure. Whatever you want.”

There was a long pause.

“For the sake of convenience,” Rush said. He sounded uncertain, as though he weren’t quite sure of the idea, or waiting for Young to take issue with it.

“Yeah,” Young said. “Convenience.”

By accident more than design, he looked at Rush and saw that Rush was biting his lip, the same uncertainty reflected in his expression. When Rush saw that Young was looking at him, he raked his chair backwards and stumbled up out of it with his plate in his hand.

“I expect higher standards than you offered me on our last expedition,” Rush said edgily, as he backed towards the kitchen. “Bear that in mind.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Young said, leaning back in his chair. “I’ll keep you in the manner to which you’ve become accustomed.”

His back was aching from being stuck in the same position for too long, and he probably ought to have gotten up and taken some pills. But he stayed, watching Rush clatter around in the kitchen, running water and scrubbing furiously at contraptions. The light in the apartment was different now than it had been earlier, denser and curled-up, packed closer in, but the feeling he had watching Rush was the same. Things in the apartment that had once felt like as bland and banal as hotel room decorations now had this veneer of Rush-ness that gave them life; and this was how it had happened, he thought: Rush washing dishes, this, this ordinary scene.

He had a feeling that when Rush talked about _what else_ , he meant something Young didn’t have a way of understanding. Like he’d said: not country music and Big Macs. But maybe for people like Young, who were never going to go up into the mountains, it could also be something like this. Or maybe there was always a _what else_ , and it changed, receded as you got closer to it. And so sometimes the difficult life was just watching a man do the dishes— sitting and letting yourself watch that man, feeling the pain from your shattered hip come and go in pulses, but finding it manageable for the moment, because you were comfortable where you were.

And maybe that was what you missed, when you were always trying to go a little further— you missed that you could see what was up in the mountains and still come back. Or that holding still itself could be what you were missing. The astonishing strangeness of a moment of comfort, exploring the unfamiliar contours— alien and as-yet-unlabeled— of the thing you had chosen to call, tentatively, rest.


	26. Chapter 26

_He sits on the white sand of the beach, at the very edge of the water, so that the waves are licking at his bare feet. The cuffs of his jeans are rolled up. The grains of sand are translucent in the light of the double moons._

_“You know what happened here,” Gloria says. She is holding an ammonite of some sort, a large smooth coil of fossil, still sticky with wet patches of the ghost-like sand. She is wearing a white dress. The foam breaks against her ankles, because she is standing in the surf._

_“No,” he says._

_She looks like a naiad, with her heavy pale hair covering her back and barely tucked behind her ears. “Of course you do,” she says. She hefts the ammonite, as though it weighed no more than a tuft of grass. “Something lived here once, but it doesn’t any longer.”_

_“They died,” he whispers._

_“Perhaps an asteroid.”_

_“The second moon. Created by the impact.”_

_Gloria bows her head. “Death emerges from the darkness. We don’t see it coming. The shape of things… changes.”_

_The tide is coming in. He sees it rushing, then pulling back, a dark and silty colour. This is not like the beaches of California, which had been blue and gold and sunlit, wild with scraggy flowers and strips of kelp, looking devoid of habitation. Gloria had loved them after the grey palette of England. It’s so bright, so lightweight, she had said. Lightweight? he had asked. England, she had said, is heavy, and he had said: heavy with the past._

_Half a human skull and a Roman brooch pulled from the Thames; the bits of clay pipes and pots worn down to sea-glass smoothness, often shaped like blunted teeth, as though history was sinking its jaws into the foreshore, insisting that it would not be ignored. America, in an act of absolute violence, had managed to erase all of that. It did not have to live on top of what it had come from, fearful of the day when those teeth would lock and a monster would manage to crawl, hurl, lurch its way onto land._

_But: That isn’t what I meant, she had said, and looked troubled. Getting rid of it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Do you really want that, Nick? Yes, he’d said, yes, yes, I want that._

_He recognises the paradox inherent in his thinking. To mourn the herds of buffalo and yet— and yet—_

_“The shape of things changes,” Gloria says again. “_ Epnia xoret, neden menet _. But nothing truly ceases to exist.”_

_But this is not accurate. It is a misrepresentation._

_He says, his voice cracking, “You did.”_

_“Then how are you dreaming about me?”_

_He digs his rigid fingers into the sand. “Fuck you,” he says. “You’re not her. You’re not real.”_

_She smiles rather sadly. “Reality is a spectrum,” she says. “You know that already.”_

_“Why are you here?”_

_“Because you have to listen, Nick.”_

_She wades out of the gathering surf and kneels beside him, holding the ammonite out to him. But it isn’t an ammonite. It’s a shell, plain, white, and ordinary._

_He takes it unwillingly. He knows what she wants him to do with it. But he’s spent so long trying not to listen. He thinks of the hundreds of records in their cardboard boxes, the piano that he never again wishes to touch. The bell-like noises he is increasingly aware of, the echo of a distant galaxy. He can hum the pitches, but he doesn’t want to know how they fit together. He wants the numbers of the cypher to be numbers again._

_“I can’t,” he says in a low voice._

_“You have to. You want to.”_

_He can’t say anything; he shakes his head._

_“Sweetheart,” she murmurs, her eyes large and solemn, “the stone has already struck you. What do you have to be afraid of?”_

_And it’s true. More true than she knows, perhaps, unless she is only a fragment of him, this dream-phantom whose white dress is growing seawater-heavy as the tide runs up over it; if she is a fragment then she knows the inconstancy of orbits, the barrage that sends you spiralling on a thousand different paths, making you an unsteady object that any qualified astronomer would almost certainly deem hostile to life, and he does not_ want _her to know that, because he wants her to be Gloria, and Gloria did not know, or if she knew she never said, though she looked at him sometimes or touched him in a way that was careful, as though she were aware how much he depended upon the gravity of her presence. I’m not a fucking charity case, he had once shouted, I don’t want pity; and she had shouted back, Then why are you always trying to turn everything I feel for you into it?_

_So one way or another she knows. She knows the extent to which it is true._

_Their eyes meet._

_She helps him lift the shell, steadying it in her beautiful hands, bring the echoing chamber of it to his ear._

_He waits to hear the roar of the sea or something different. He waits for the notes he has always been waiting for and that have always been waiting for him to arrive so he could hear._

_And they are—_

_Dx4_

_xE4_

_xF#4_

_Ax4_

_not-quite-Eflat5_

_Eflat5_

_not-quite-Eflat5_

_Axx4_

_not-quite-Eflat5_

_Eflat5_

_Fxx5_

_Eflat5_

_not-quite-Eflat5—_

_but there is more; he can feel it; the whole progression waiting to be heard— overtones and rhythms and arpeggiated progressions— and it is beautiful, all of it, so beautiful it hurts his bones, and he grips the seashell so hard, trying to— trying to—_

Somewhere an electronic instrument was issuing its flat, synthetic alarm.

Rush opened his eyes and did not recognise, for a moment, his own comfort. He was warm, and breathing in the scent of leather and wool. His face was pressed to a pillow. Someone had draped a heavy Western-print blanket over him. He attributed the act of blanket-draping to _someone_ because he did not remember arranging to sleep in such a fashion. His last memory was of critiquing the dreadful accents in a film that Young was watching. _Prosody_ , he’d said drowsily, slouched against the back of the sofa. _It’s not about the words; one can’t learn them in isolation. No one in the entirety of Britain has ever used such—_ He must have fallen asleep for a moment, because Young had asked, _Such what?_ Blurrily, Rush had groped for the word, and then said, _Intonation._

Young had laughed softly. _Go to sleep_ , he’d said.

Now Young was swearing under his breath in the kitchen. There was a clinking sound— a spoon in a coffee cup.

Rush’s limbs felt heavy. His body wanted to stay: stay here, listening to Young’s quiet noises. He wished he had not slept in Young’s apartment. Every happiness was the harbinger of a death, exactly commensurate in area and in volume, and—

He had dreamt of asteroids.

He sat up, muzzy-headed, throwing off the blanket.

“Hey,” Young said, and a moment later appeared at the end of the couch. “Sorry if I woke you up. I meant to catch the coffeemaker before it went off.”

Rush squinted at him. “My coffeemaker doesn’t have an alarm.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know how to _use_ your coffeemaker. I’m pretty sure I’d have to have a PhD.” Young perched on the armrest and drank his coffee. He looked sleep-rumpled: wearing a faded shirt, his curly hair flat. “I didn’t want to waste time figuring it out; I already cleared our trip with the Mountain, and I meant it about getting an early start.”

“Oh, yes?” Rush groped on the coffee table for his glasses. “Have you decided where you’re dragging me off to?”

“Yup.” Young looked insufferably pleased with himself.

Rush narrowed his eyes as he brought Young into focus. “But you’re not going to tell me.”

“You’ll see when we get there.”

“I could refuse to go, you realise.”

But he wouldn’t, he thought. He considered the thought: a stone thrown into his mind’s flat waters, its mass and velocity pushing outwards, disturbing everything. The object itself would not unform. It was now part of the river, a small, hard, steady, solid thing. He could feel it there, in his body. He couldn’t decide what his reaction ought to be.

“Yeah,” Young said mildly. “You could. But then you’d miss the surprise. So— up and at ’em.”

Rush glared at him and, unwillingly stood. “Have I still got a toothbrush in your bathroom?”

Young wrinkled his nose. “If not, I’m sending you back to your apartment. We’ve got a two hour drive ahead of us.”

“Do we.”

“I figured you’d enjoy getting in a really good long lecture covering all the things you hate about Colorado. You can point them out as we drive past.”

Rush considered this opportunity. “Acceptable,” he allowed. He pushed past Young. “If you intend on force-feeding me examples of American cuisine, please keep in mind that I refuse to eat anything requiring less than ten minutes to prepare.”

“I can’t tell you how surprised I am to hear it,” Young said. He didn’t look very surprised. “Don’t worry.”

“I never worry.” Rush had stopped in the kitchen to fix himself a cup of Young’s inferior coffee.

“I’m just saying,” Young said. “I’ve got a plan.”

* * *

“You realise, of course, that I don’t actually hate Colorado,” Rush said, as they were driving through the town of Monument.

They had headed north, following I-25 along the eastern edge of the mountains. It was an extraordinarily crisp and bright autumn day, of the sort that only occurred in America. The British Isles lacked the quality of light to sustain it, as though even after the clouds had passed the air was saturated with rain. Or perhaps it was the sky, rendered vast here by the Rockies, the magnitude of whose presence moved every object, every scene onto a scale that seemed impossible. The whole world seemed to have so much space in it, when you saw those mountains, that every car, bird, fencepost, traffic light within it was small. You examined them microscopically. No wonder Tesla, dwelling there, had envisioned the planet as a bell.

“No?” Young glanced over at where Rush was drumming his fingers against the car door. “You do a pretty good impression of it.”

“Colorado Springs, perhaps.” Rush stared out the window, at the flat gold stretch of grassy land that met the mountains’ far-off blue-and-smoke ridge. “America as a nation, not so much as a landscape. I watched Westerns as a child. Like any other child. I suppose it took me a long time to understand why I liked them so much.”

“You like _Westerns?_ ” Young asked incredulously.

Rush threw him an irritated look. “I’m a mathematician, not an alien.”

Then he realised what he had said, and pressed his lips together tightly.

There was a long silence.

“I just meant because you were Scottish,” Young ventured at last. “Although I guess I did kind of picture you as more of a nerd. You know. Big thick glasses.”

Rush shrugged jerkily. “Glasses are breakable. In a cinema, at least no one can…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He turned his head to the side. He hadn’t meant to say that, really. Not that it was a secret; if Young, who had no business imagining the child him, had imagined the child him, he must surely have imagined it. An undersized, hyperverbal boy with a talent for mathematics; there was no city in the world in which he might have stood a chance.

“I guess that’s true,” Young said after a pause. “I always just headed out in the Bighorn foothills. Not that I— I was never good at school, was my thing. Never much good at talking. I didn't have to explain myself to the wilderness.”

To his surprise, Rush found himself imagining it. Young as a child. What might he have looked like? Dark looping curls, the early start of the snub, pugnacious features, already finding their stubborn set. On a pony, perhaps. Was that what children did in Wyoming? Ride ponies? Stoic, wearing miniature boots and a too-big version of a cowboy hat. The image made Rush inexplicably sad, even as something in it charmed him. 

It occurred to him that Young was waiting for a response. “Yes,” he said. “The one experience we have in common, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Young said, stealing another glance at him. “Maybe.” Then, after a beat had passed: “So why did you like Westerns?”

Rush rested his head against the window, eyes fixed on a bird of prey that was floating with elegant indifference high overhead. He admired its dark shape, the proprietary senses with which it separated the terrestrial world into what was predator, prey, friend. “Perhaps someday,” he said, “if you’re lucky, I’ll tell you.”

He could feel Young’s eyes, watching him.

* * *

They stopped outside of Denver at a storefront restaurant, little better than a kiosk, that sold tacos. Young argued that the meat had been stewed, a process that technically lasted more than ten minutes, and Rush— who by this point was starting to feel quite hungry, though he would not have admitted it— thus grudgingly deemed the food to fall within his stated guidelines. Young ordered in a halting, awkward Spanish that Rush would not have hypothesised him to possess, and was handed a white paper bag filled with items wrapped in tinfoil.

He held the bag out to Rush, but made no move towards one of the restaurant’s few white plastic tables. “Grab a soda,” he said, gesturing towards a cooler full of glass bottles.

Rush narrowed a sceptical gaze at the neon-coloured fluid the bottles contained. “Are we not eating here?”

“Nope. We can eat where we’re going.”

“Though I assume you still refuse to tell me where that is.”

“Yup.” Young adjusted his grip on his crutches. “Don’t worry; we’re close. The food won’t get cold. Grab me an orange one, would you?”

Rush pulled an orange bottle of soda from the cooler, and then— out of a vague hope that Young might find it offensive— opted for the guava flavour, which was bright pink.

* * *

Young had been telling the truth. It was only perhaps fifteen minutes before he signalled to pull off the motorway again. The elevation at which they were travelling had increased by this point; they were past the outskirts of the city and in amongst a rumpled landscape of sandy, erratically tree-spotted hills, with the higher peaks of the Rockies a white crest in the distance.

“I don’t see anything,” Rush said dubiously.

But then he did see it. Or, rather, he saw them.

Young parked the truck in the dirt beside a spindly wire fence that separated a wide slope of grassland from the road. Beyond the fence, apparently oblivious to the sound of traffic from I-70’s parallel tracks, some twenty or thirty buffalo were grazing— shaggy, fat-backed, and placid. Some were resting in the shade of a pine grove’s needled branches, farther up the hillside; a few, however, were so close that Rush could see their small curved horns and their large, dark, curiously-spaced eyes.

“They’re not pure bison,” Young said, into the silence that had resulted from turning off the engine. He sounded strange— nervous, almost. “Not quite. You can see the pure ones up in Yellowstone, the ones that survived. These guys are descended from some of them, but they’ve got a little cattle mixed in somewhere.”

When Rush didn’t immediately say anything, he added hurriedly, “You can’t always see them from the road, so it was kind of a gamble. But they’re usually here this time of year. And I thought you might—“

He didn’t say what he thought Rush might. The sentence simply ended.

Rush didn’t, either, ask. He stared through the windscreen at the animals, their blunt, lumbering bodies.

Time passed.

He opened the door of the truck and, without a word, climbed out.

The sun was very hot now. He knew that it was not because of the higher elevation, but the fallacy was tempting. He felt he was nearer to the photons’ source. The pale light’s particle-waves seemed to possess a newness. Their energetic antinomy, not dissipated by the short distance, struck his skin with searing force. He found it too bright, and had to squint against it, shading his eyes as he approached the fence.

A buffalo on the other side had its head bent to the pasture. Rush spent a moment considering it. He had no way of knowing how old it was, but it looked ancient, as though it had always, since the dawn of the world, had to carry the burden of itself on its back. There was intelligence in its gaze, which he knew was a projection. It was a dumb animal. Its chief instinct was to graze on the prairie grass that no longer stretched in abundance down the broad spine of the continent. It had no way of knowing that its ancestors had died, or how tenuous was the grasp that its species maintained. Yet at the same time this knowledge seemed a part of its body. So perhaps it did not have to know. It lived out apprehension in its hair and horns, its tendons, nerves, and hooves.

It huffed at Rush as he came closer, but didn’t seem alarmed by his presence. It went back to chewing the shallow grass from the earth.

“Hello,” Rush said softly.

He was thinking of Sheppard. Sheppard and the horse that he had loved. _I didn’t have to worry about her loving me back._ That was what Sheppard had said. _Everyone else wanted something from me. But not her._

Of course, animals did want. They wanted animal things. To be fed. To be stroked. Not to be alone, perhaps. A light history to carry with them. No one could give that to this hybrid herd, which had its origin in a ruined landscape that ought never to have existed. They had been thrust into being already scarred. Already doomed.

And yet they were here. Vast and dark and soft and set against eradication. The one by the fence shifted its stubby legs, letting them dig into the turf.

Rush held his hand out towards it, pressing his palm against the hard wire.

The buffalo’s eyes flickered curiously at him. It seemed, for a wild animal, very tame. It lapped at the grass with a long tongue, huffed again, and then lifted its enormous head up, just high enough to snuffle its wide wet black nose against Rush’s hand.

The sensation was odd, but not unpleasant. Rush was abruptly, acutely aware of the buffalo as a wholly foreign creature, something with a will he could not understand. It could have struck down the fence, probably, and he would not have been able to outrun it. It possessed a physical power that he did not have. For all he knew, it was aware of him as one of its destroyers, in a vague, dim, embodied animal sense. Yet here it met him for this briefest of moments, and he felt from it a surge of acknowledgement, an almost electric charge in the air between them. Its steady dark eyes, appearing remote and sleepy underneath the thick coarse mass of its mane, regarded him— judged him— arrived at a conclusion.

What conclusion this was, it did not see fit to express. It snorted, tossed its head, and then resumed the patient work of gramineal mastication.

Rush became aware that Young was standing at his left shoulder. He dropped his hand at once, abashed.

Young didn’t say anything. Then he said, “I’ll take you to see the Yellowstone herd some time. There’s more of them. Not millions. But, you know— enough, maybe. Enough to come back.”

“There’s no coming back,” Rush said, his voice unaccountably thick. “That’s not how it works.”

Young paused. “No,” he said. “I guess not. Still. It’s something, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Rush said. “It’s something.”

They stood for a while longer, watching the buffalo meander across the gentle sweep of their grassy hill. Rush, driven by an impulse that went against his instinctual habits, but feeling caught in a moment that existed outside of the ordinary paradigms of space and time, reached out to find Young’s hand where it rested on the grip of a crutch and placed his own hand over it. Young did not speak, or show any sign of reaction— though Rush was not looking at him, so he had no access to the expression that Young displayed. He thought that Young was almost certainly looking at _him_. He was surprised to discover within himself something unformed and nascent that felt capable of being seen.

“We should eat,” Young said finally. “The food’s getting cold.”

There was a rickety wooden picnic table beside the bare-dirt parking lot. It bore the look of having been exposed to a decade’s worth of rainstorms. But it bore up under Young’s weight, and then under Rush’s weight, when Rush sat beside him— not examining why he had determined this to be the optimal choice of seating. Young spread out the tacos and small containers of sauces. He opened the bottles of soda on the edge of the bench, with a faint glow suggesting that for some unfathomable reason he considered this to be a noteworthy skill.

The tacos were good, though Young took their consumption as reason to insist on relating a long saga of other tacos he had eaten: their comparative quality, their regional variations, the circumstances in which they had been encountered. He had travelled a surprising amount. Rush found it difficult, sometimes, to mentally encompass the size of America— the vastly different biomes, histories, cultures. Young had lived in Florida, where hurricanes battered the coastline; he had lived in New Mexico, with its atom bomb. He gave the impression, even through his lexical deficiencies and a mind that was a little like unfinished wood, that he had thought deeply if haltingly about these locations. It was disconcerting. Rush stared out at the buffalo as he listened, then turned his gaze on Young, because he could no longer avoid the action without having to examine why it was one he wished to avoid. Young’s face was perfectly ordinary, oddly boyish, creased with care. A stray curl, grown long, had flopped onto his forehead. Rush experienced a strong and inexplicable desire to reach out and comb it back. He shut his eyes for a moment. Young was talking about Cuban sandwiches, gesticulating with one blunt-fingered hand.

“Is this a date?” Rush asked abruptly. “Are you attempting to date me?”

Young halted in the middle of a sentence about certain Miami-specific breads. His mouth opened and did not close.

“I’m just asking,” Rush said. He found it difficult to look at Young. He stared at the silver-grey grain of the picnic table’s wood instead. “So that I have— an adequate amount of information.”

Young still did not speak. “I don’t,” he said at last, when the silence had become unsustainable. “I don’t really— do that.”

“Date men.”

Young turned away and took a jerky swig of his neon orange soda. “I guess. Yeah.”

“I see.”

“I can’t just—“

“You fuck but you don’t _touch_ ,” Rush said. “Is that it?”

Young lowered his head. He looked as though he were in physical pain. To be fair, Rush had received the impression that Young was, in fact, often in physical pain. But this was a separate pain, with an origin not so easily uncovered. “Yeah,” Young said, sounding hoarse. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Rush nodded and gazed out past the pasture, to where great sculptures of clouds formed a slow procession above the white lines of the motorway.

“Do you want it to be a date?” Young asked, after another long silence. “I thought you didn’t trust me. You locked yourself in your apartment for two-and-a-half days.”

Rush shrugged minutely.

“Yeah? What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

This was the crux, because Rush himself was not certain. He had not permitted himself to think so far yet. He felt caught between several courses of action. Objects compressed into the substrata of his mind surged uncomfortably to his attention, seethed and clamoured. He did not, of course, wish to be romantically involved with Young. Such an idea was ridiculous. Young was a thug. And Rush did not wish to be romantically involved with anyone. He wished for the opposite of that, an isolation that would be absolute and immaterial, lacking the most particulate of contact points with any part of the agonizing world. But to be nothing was— he had glimpsed it in the motel room in Grand Junction. And he had fled, afterwards, to Young’s bed, as he had fled there after returning from the Ancients’ white city, wanting— something that he did not know the shape of and could only grope towards in the darkness, a blind and bioluminescent creature down in the abyss, moving as ever towards what it sensed with cells that did not process data. They didn’t resist, those creatures; why would they? How could they? It was what they were made for. And for them it was as simple as that.

And for him perhaps as simple as turning and reaching forwards to brush the stray curl back from Young’s face.

The breath rushed out of Young: an audible reaction. He brought his hand up to grip Rush’s wrist. The hold was tight; it hurt. But he didn’t remove Rush’s hand. He stared at Rush, his brow creased. His thumb moved slowly against Rush’s wristbone, too careful to be violence, too heavy to be a caress.

“I thought you didn’t touch,” Rush said. The words came out low and faintly uneven.

“I thought _you_ didn’t,” Young said. He swallowed.

“I don’t,” Rush said.

Young leaned forward and kissed him.

It was a clumsy, hesitant kiss. His eyes were closed, and he hadn’t released Rush’s hand, so his aim was off and his mouth landed slightly left of centre, touching the corner of Rush’s lips. The sensation was soft. It lingered. Rush held very still as Young fumbled to correct his error, finding his way across Rush’s mouth in a series of small motions that were not quite separate kisses, but not quite, either, all the same one. His lips were tentative, and a long time seemed to pass before he touched a hand to the side of Rush’s face. Then that touch, too, was tentative— barely present, with a shaky reverence in the brush of rough palm against skin.

Rush thought it was only right that he reciprocate, but he did not know how to do so. He felt that if he moved at all, he would upset a delicate balance. Something terrible would happen. An asteroid would strike the earth, or a coronal mass injection would split the magnetosphere with aurora. Electronics would cease to function; the infrastructures of cities would collapse. This was how it started: the interchange of molecules, bodies becoming proximate, your breath meeting another person’s breath. It seemed small at the time, of course it did, but on a quantum level the catastrophe was brewing. He could feel it jolting his nerves and muscles, the incipient ghost-threat, a warning from the future he was creating in which he had handed himself over entirely to something he would not always be able to have, and he _knew_ how that ended, and the apprehension ran needles of nervous-making current from his toes all the way to the top of his head. And perhaps the disaster was something else entirely, perhaps he was being selfish, because there was a real possibility that he destroyed people as well; _it will eat you up_ , Sheppard had said, but at the time Rush had found it difficult to discern the precise distinction between the city and himself, so it was possible, really possible, that he was the one who did the consuming, and he did not want to do that to Young, any more than he wanted to knock the Earth from its orbit or draw the attention of the sun or attract asteroids through the minutest of gravitic interactions or any of the innumerable cataclysms he could envisioned unfolding when all he wanted— all he wanted was—

He opened his mouth slightly. His intent was to explain to Young the deterministic proliferation of planetary and even interplanetary peril, but to his surprise he found himself returning the kiss.

Young tasted faintly of orange soda, which ought to have been unpleasant but wasn’t. At the first touch of Rush’s tongue— an exploratory flicker, just the barest edge of osculation, a mathematical form of contact more intimate than tangency, and why was it that mathematics could imagine nothing more tender, why, for all Catullus’s _basia mille_ , was there was no possibility of _basiation_ for curves— he made a sound at the back of his throat and returned the gesture: not fervently but almost-shyly, tracing out Rush’s lower lip. Rush exhaled and was happy not to be a curve. He sought more points of intersection, pressing closer to mouth gently where Young’s own open mouth was available to him.

At some point Young seemed to remember that he was still holding Rush’s wrist captive— or simply came to the conclusion that he needed another hand— and released it. Rush took advantage of the new-found freedom to tangle his fingers in Young’s absurdly looping hair, finding a strangely affectionate, outsize pleasure in sifting through the individual curls.

“I should cut it,” Young murmured, his mouth curving against Rush’s. “Regulations.”

Rush said breathlessly, “Don’t.”

Young had cupped a hand at the nape of Rush’s neck. He let it rest there heavily, drawing their heads together. “We shouldn’t—“ he began softly. “I mean, not—“

“—Here,” Rush finished. But he didn’t move away.

“Yeah. It’s kind of— public.” But Young didn’t move away either. “I didn’t actually mean to—“

“Touch?”

“Yeah.” Young did pull back then, but only to study Rush’s face. “I just really wanted—“

Rush looked down, feeling his cheeks warm. He hated the high northern complexion that left him subject to blushing. One more weakness bequeathed to him by his fraught and treacherous, troublesome ancestry. “Yes,” he said. “Well.”

“I really don’t—“

“We’ve established.” Rush pushed away from Young’s lingering touch and stood. He abruptly wished to not be in this precise spatiotemporal location. He folded his arms over his chest and took a few not-entirely-steady steps away from the picnic table, towards the fence line. The buffalo, on the other side, had moved further up the hillside. The noonday sun turned its coat a blazing amber colour; beautiful, Rush thought, but easy to hunt.

“Rush,” Young said behind him.

Rush didn’t turn.

“I— want to.” Young seemed to be forcing the words out. “I still want to.” He paused. “I want it to be— what you said.”

Orbits, Rush thought, could also be osculatory. An osculating orbit was easy to predict and mathematically pure, untouched by any perturbations. The motion of other objects. Their radiation. Heat. Touch. Resistance. Attraction.

“A date,” he said.

Young let out a long slow breath. “I guess. If that’s what you want to call it.”

“What else would you like to call it? An astronomical alignment? Traditionally, there are three bodies involved in a syzygy; however, under the circumstances, perhaps—“

Young’s hand caught at his shirtsleeve. Rush hadn’t realised that Young was standing behind him.

“Can you just—“ Young said. Apparently he had contracted, in the last several minutes, a disease that rendered him incapable of finishing his sentences. “Can you look at me when we’re talking?”

He tugged at Rush’s arm and Rush, reluctantly, turned. Young was gazing at him with a focussed intensity of which Rush had not thought him capable, a deep and serious, glowing, tawny weight. It felt like a physical warmth on Rush’s shoulders.

“It’s not easy,” Young said, like a confession. “For me.”

“It never is, for anyone.”

“But I’m used to working hard for things.”

Rush opened his mouth to reply, and then realised that he had no reply— that he did not want to complicate or contradict Young’s statement. He knew, anyway, that it was the truth— Young had many flaws; too many, really, to concatenate, but they were flaws that habituated one to work. For an instant he saw a flash of that small boy on his pony, grim-faced in too-large hat and boots, doing a kind of work in which there was no such thing as talent, only physical labour and stick-to-it-iveness.

“All right,” he said.

Young’s face registered surprise. “All right?”

Rush nodded haltingly. His shoulders were still hunched, his arms folded. “I provisionally accept your overture.”

“Oh,” Young said. He still looked startled. “Good.”

“I’ll cook you dinner.”

“I’d like that.”

Rush turned away from Young again, finding the nearness of him unnerving, difficult to tolerate. He stared out at the sweep of pasture, the speckled hills in the distance, and the mounded white clouds overhead.

“I’m glad you liked the buffalo,” Young said. He too was now looking at the pasture. “I wanted to take you somewhere, show you something that was—“ One hand came up, sketching a complicated half-shape in the air. “—I don’t know. I’m not usually this bad with words.”

“No. I know what you mean,” Rush said.

He had been watching the sparse herd roam over the hillside— absurd creatures, bobbing their carpeted heads, yet touched by a tremendous and haunting dignity that seemed to embed them within a landscape much larger and more tragic than themselves— and, to his surprise, when he reflected upon what he had told Young, he found that it was true. He did.

* * *

On the way back to Colorado Springs, in the truck, their hands kept colliding. The habitual movements of their bodies had somehow altered, orientating towards each other, so that Rush raised a hand to rake his hair back just when Young decided to reach for the dial that controlled the air conditioner. Objects collided. Perturbations in the orbits. Rush said nothing. It continued to happen. He caught Young looking at him, a faint crease at the side of his mouth suggesting pleasure. Another faint and unstoppable Caledonian flush crept up his face.

But it was a long drive, and Rush felt in some sense exhausted— battered down by the tumultuous creation of thoughts that he was not yet quite prepared to confront. His eyes were heavy by the southern outskirts of Denver, and the changeable Southwestern sun had turned, by then, into something honey-like and soporific that beat down upon the windscreen of the truck.

“Hey, hotshot, you awake?” Young asked at some point, and Rush said, drowsily, “Hmm?”

Young laughed quietly. “I’ll tell you later,” he said in a gentle and maddeningly tolerant voice.

* * *

_He sits cross-legged on the blue-and-white tiles, watching water spout unevenly from the fountain, falling with a stochastic music into itself, which is to say that the falling water is at first not part of the larger body and then it is all one undifferentiated mass._

_The sun has him in its mouth. It is hot. It would have to be. A hot sun for the fermentation of life. Assuming that they came from here, the Ancients, which he thinks they did. He can feel it in the bones of the city. The age, the evolution, the rhizomatic mass of a civilization rising and consuming and iterating and breaking down the bricks of itself to re-permute. Permutate? All the energy of it is still there._

_“The electrical impulses,” Gloria says. She is seated on the other side of the fountain, watching him intently with curious eyes._

_He looks away. “You’re not really here.”_

_“I am. And I’m not.”_

_“What are you really?” He stands abruptly, filled with a restless, jerky feeling. “There’s something wrong here.”_

_She regards him calmly. “Perhaps I am on the other side of the door.”_

_“A paradox.”_

_“Yes.”_

_The fountain is giving him a headache. The water is music; it is a stochastic music falling and_

_Gloria is suddenly very close to him. “Nick,” she says, “you’re not_ listening _.”_

 _But he can’t_ not _listen._

_The water is eating itselfthe water iteratesthewater_

_“Yes,” she says. “Now you understand.”_

_He presses the heels of his palms to his head, trying to push the noise out, but he cannot because he finds it difficult to discern the precise distinction between_

_the cityand himselfthe citythatiterateshimself the_

_xE5_

_[xEflat5, Dx4]_

_[Gx4, Dx4]_

_[xB4, Ex4]_

_[xDflat5, Ex4]_

_It keeps ringing._

_He can’t push it out because there is no outside._

_“I’m going to open the first door now, Nick,” she says._

_“No. Don’t.”_

_The sun hurts. Ex5The water hurts._

_The earth was found to be alive,[xE5, xF#4]_

_literally, alive Ex5_

_with electrical impulses.[xG5, Ax4]_

_Lightning. Ex5_

_“The shape of things changes.”_

_He burnt out the transformer in El Paso. Lightning in a jar. [xG5, Ax4]_

_“Time to change.” [xBflat5, xEflat5, xF#4]_

_He wants to listen and he does not want to listen and he wants to listen and he does not want to listen and he listens and it does not make a difference if he does or does not want to listen because he can’t not listen so he listens and he wants and he does not want and the light impales him and he draws a draws a draws a breath and the door is—_

A light touch.

Rush jolted forwards, breathing in huge, shattered gasps, his arms coming up instinctively to cover his head.

“Whoa. Easy.”

He tore at his seatbelt, fumbling, hands shaking, frantic, the door, the door, the buckle, and the straps were tangled, and he shoved them aside, and then the door, the—

Outside it was almost evening and the air cut into him, crisp and sharp. His hands were still shaking. He couldn’t seem to make them stop. He leant against the truck, eyes shut. His ears were ringing. He could still hear it. The sequence of chiming, alien, metallophonic chords. It was just— there. It was there. In his head. And he could not evict it.

“Hey,” Young said cautiously from just beside him.

Rush startled again, because he was apparently unable to get even the slightest fucking handle on himself; instead, his body had, in its infinite wisdom, chosen to display this particular vulnerability extravagantly to Young, which he loved, he did, he really fucking _loved_ that, and it seemed only fair that he should extend to his body the same regard that it showed to him, so he groped in his back pocket for a packet of cigarettes and a lighter and lit one with a nerveless fucking hand.

Young was regarding him with concern. “What’s going on?”

“ _Nothing_ ,” Rush said, as vituperatively as he could manage, sucking on his cigarette. “Nothing is _going on_.”

Young wrinkled his nose and waved the cloud of smoke away. “Really? Cause it seems like something’s definitely—“

“I have _dreams._ That’s _all_. Ever since— with Sheppard.” Slowly Rush turned lightheaded with the hit of nicotine. It did not silence the noise, but it allowed him to determine with more facility and a degree of certainty what was real and not real.

Young said slowly, “You were pretty shook up after that.”

“No.”

“Yes. You were unconscious for hours.”

“I was not _shook up_ ; I was not even _shaken_ up, which is the correct participial form, not that I judge you capable of altering your participial habits, as much as I might—“ Rush made a noise of frustration and closed his eyes again. His head ached as though he himself were the instrument, as though his skull were the gong, drum, stone, or glass being struck, producing the unlikely microtonal sequence. “Could you just—“ he managed. “Talk to me?”

“What?” Young sounded bewildered.

Rush waved an unsteady hand. “Talk.”

“About what?”

“Fucking— the weather; I don’t give a fuck. You— it’s a question of sound waves. You have a pitch. It destructively interferes.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good thing,” Young said.

Rush cracked a weary eye open. “It is.”

His voice was more serious than he had intended, dense with strata of emotions that he had hoped to leave unexpressed. He wished he had left his eyes closed. And yet he didn’t; he was glad he had been looking, because it allowed him to see a moment in which something flowered, very briefly and covertly, in Young— a fleeting and difficult-to-pinpoint rush ofwarmth, before Young buried it beneath a facade of stoicism.

“Okay,” Young said. “How about we go inside. You can get a glass of water, and I’ll talk to you all you want.”

Rush considered the possibility of arguing, at least for the full consumption of his cigarette. It was bad policy, he thought, to start acquiescing to Young’s demands. Best to lay down the ground rules. The basic principles of engagement. But he couldn’t bear to be standing in this crepuscular car park any longer, listening to the quasi-musical drone of Colorado’s chirping insects, which clashed subtly with the tones that he could not stop hearing.

He tossed the cigarette to the ground and ground it out, massaging one temple. “Yes. All right. But could you possibly—“ He couldn’t force himself to ask the favour.

There was a pause.

“Now, you mean?” Young asked quietly.

Rush didn’t say anything.

“—Well, come on,” Young said, and set out towards the building’s entrance on his crutches. He didn’t look behind him to see if Rush would follow. His voice increased in volume a little as he said, “You know I could probably get a handicapped permit? A temporary one, I mean. Obviously. Of course. Still, it’d mean I got the primo parking, which’d be awfully convenient if, you know, I ever actually went anywhere…”

Rush trailed after him. He had not been mistaken. With Young’s presence, with the rumble of his voice, the pressure had eased inside his head, though somewhere a small precise mallet was still tip-tip-tapping across the vast and shivering face of something he could not see. Something changeable and depthless. A foreign country.

Perhaps he could not see it, he thought, because it was inside of him.

He did not find the idea comforting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The [Genesee bison herd](https://www.denvergov.org/content/denvergov/en/denver-parks-and-recreation/parks/mountain-parks/genesee-mountain-park.html) is real.


	27. Chapter 27

“Rush,” Young said.

He watched as Rush jerked his head up from where he had been blankly contemplating a crumb-covered plate that, ten minutes ago, had held an example of Rush’s latest culinary concoction— bread and cheese and basil and some kind of weird tomato-juice gel, which Rush had described as _balsamic-foam mozzarella bruschetta with tomato caviar._

“Yes,” Rush said. His eyes, which had turned troublingly vague, refocused. “Sorry. Were we— We were speaking about something.”

“Yeah,” Young said slowly. “You kind of zoned out.”

It had happened two or three times since they got back from Genesee, which made Young think— well, he didn’t know what to think, exactly. Under normal circumstances—

Normal circumstances.

He covered his mouth with a hand without meaning to as he remembered the touch of Rush’s lips. Soft and dry, still slightly sticky from the Mexican soda, tasting of artificial sugar and cigarette smoke. Then opening under his own, so that he was suddenly kissing into and not merely kissing against; Rush hesitant but at the same time openly desiring, even a little bit needy in the way he was the first one to introduce the lightest warm daring dart of a tongue. Young had never been so aware of a kiss as a question and answer— a way of asking and receiving some kind of confirmation that there was no other way to give.

It had been a mistake, really. A moment of weakness. It was probably still a mistake, if he was honest, and almost certainly a sign that he was weak. But he had thought, maybe… Maybe he had thought that he was weak anyway, fucked anyway, with his broken back and his broken marriage; maybe he had wanted just a slightly bigger slice of that _what else_ that seemed so important to Rush. And then he had done the thing, and he couldn’t undo it. He couldn’t unknow what it was like to kiss Rush. At the same time, the world had not ended, and he had not been thrust— via the action— into an unnavigable morass, devoid of any certainty or guidance once he had stepped outside the set moral grid of the city Man. He had simply been a man who had kissed another man, not as part of the negotiations that set the rules for sex, but because he had wanted to do it, and in that moment it had not seemed like such a terribly proscribed thing to want.

A part of him was still waiting for the walls to start collapsing. Or— in a taste of Rush’s paranoia— the ceiling to start showing cracks.

So in a way it was good that Rush had been freaking out, since it diverted Young’s attention. Although Rush wasn’t exactly _freaking out_ — that was the thing. When Rush freaked out, under _normal circumstances,_ he usually just started yelling at a more and more hysterical pitch about mountains and home furnishings and the military and how much he hated Young’s couch. He didn’t actually seem to be freaking out, at least not about about the whole— _issue_ ,because when he wasn’t off wherever he kept going inside his own head, he was hanging onto Young’s every word and tracking Young with a serious, dark, and almost drowning gaze that made Young feel hot inside his clothes and self-conscious.

“I’m just—“ Rush ran a hand through his hair. “Distracted.” He made an abrupt move to stand. “I need my laptop; I should fetch my laptop.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Young said uneasily.

“I need to work on the cipher.”

“I thought we were taking the day off.”

“Ah.” Rush blinked, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I do seem to recall that conversation.”

“Yeah. So— I want the rest of my day.”

That succeeded in provoking the disdainful arch of an eyebrow and the hint of a smile, quickly suppressed. “ _Your_ day?”

“I’m the one who suggested it.” Young leaned back in his chair. “The cipher can wait till tomorrow.”

“You’re meant to be pushing me to finish it. It’s your project.” There was just the slightest challenge in Rush’s voice.

“So I have the authority to say: give it a rest. Besides, I thought I wasn’t allowed to do the dishes.”

“Oh, very well,” Rush said, sounding exasperated now. “I’ll continue to cook and clean for you, utilizing my once-in-a-generation cognitive powers in the service of providing you with a convenient sort of housewife.”

He stalked off to the kitchen, started some water running, and then returned to snatch away Young’s plate. On the brink of turning, he paused and said, without looking at Young, “But could you—“

Young felt his brow crease. But he said only, “Sure. I’ll keep you company.”

So he leaned against the kitchen island while Rush populated the dishwasher and rinsed the components of his caviar-making machine in the sink. Rush washed dishes, as he did everything, with a precise energy that was right on the edge of frenetic, suggesting an absolute commitment to his actions that was a little unnerving when unleashed on household chores.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Young asked idly, because he knew Rush wanted him to keep talking.

Rush examined the serrated edge of a bread knife. “What?”

“You know. Playing housewife.”

“Why? Does it bother you?”

“Does it bother me that you play housewife?”

Rush threw Young a withering look.

Young sighed. “It doesn’t bother me.”

“Fascinating.” Rush shut off the water.

“What?”

“You lie with a phenomenal lack of talent.”

“I’m not—“

Rush had been drying his hands on a dishcloth. Now he turned and approached Young with a expression that somehow managed to be quiet, serious, and confrontational at the same time. It turned the air around him a different texture, gave it a muggy-yet-electric, hair-raising, pre-hurricane feel. Young remembered from Pensacola. He swallowed hard, unable to look away from Rush.

Rush reached out and placed the flat of his palm against Young’s chest, his fingertips not quite touching Young’s collarbone. Young was abruptly, excruciatingly aware of the thinness of his shirt, a worn flannel number he’d put on that morning in case the weather was chilly. He could feel the warmth of Rush’s hand through it.

“What are you doing?” he asked unsteadily.

“Making a point,” Rush said. He trailed his hand upwards and traced the corner of Young’s shirt collar, as though considering whether he needed to smooth it into place.

“And— what’s that?” Young swallowed again. He felt a little lightheaded.

“That _not_ lying has its benefits.”

Rush had lowered his eyes, denying Young their dark, restless, and intoxicating weight. Young was overwhelmed by all the half-formed ideas of things he wanted to do in that moment, each one of them seeming tantalizingly close yet out of his reach. A swell of lust he hadn’t previously been aware of was somewhere at the bottom; he was conscious of consciously not imagining what Rush would be like in bed. But there were other desires, just as taboo: he wanted to kiss Rush again, wanted to wrap both arms around him and hold him, wanted to take the hand that was currently resting lightly against his shoulder and press his mouth to the palm of it.

“I—“ he said, feeling paralyzed. He thought that Rush would probably _let_ him do those things, was the problem. Rush came with his own set of rules about what was permitted and forbidden, and over the past month, little by little, he had moved Young inside of the area governed by that set, to the point that Young had kissed him, and had committed himself to a course of action that would call for more kissing, or at least committed himself to a single definition that ever-so-slightly destabilized all other definitions, allowing the possibility of it.

He brought his hand up to cover Rush’s hand, holding it pressed against him for a moment. He was summoning up the self-will to do more than that when Rush tilted his head as though listening to something and said in a very abstracted voice, “I don’t know what your pitch _is_ , but you certainly have one. I suppose it gets louder when I’m near to you. That would explain…”

His voice trailed off. He didn’t say what it would explain.

“Uh— what?” Young said, his concerns abruptly braking and making a hard turn to the left.

“I told you. It interferes. Like noise-canceling headphones.”

Rush was frowning faintly; he seemed to think this made perfect sense. But while Young had been willing to give him a little leeway right after a nightmare, when he’d obviously been a little out-of-it and upset, doing so when Rush started talking like a crazy person unprompted in the middle of the kitchen was a completely different kind of ask.

“What do you mean, I have a _pitch?_ ” Young said, keeping hold of Rush’s hand. “Are you— _hearing_ something?”

Rush’s gaze flickered up to Young’s face for a microsecond, then back down. “No. Of course not. That would be— upsetting.”

“Are you sure?”

“Why would I lie about something like that?”

“I don’t know,” Young said warily.

“I need to go and work on the cipher. That’s all. It’s important. It’s extremely important.” Rush delicately tried to extricate himself from Young’s grasp, and seemed confused when Young didn’t immediately release him.

“Hotshot, we just had this conversation,” Young said. He felt a recurring twinge of unease.

Rush shook his head. “Yes, but— clearly you fail to appreciate the situation.”

“I don’t _appreciate_ it, but mostly I just want to understand it.”

“There’s nothing to understand. I simply need to work on the cipher.” Rush tried again to extract himself.

This time, helplessly, Young let him go. “Okay,” he said, drawing the vowel out to communicate his reluctance. “But you can work on it here, right? If you get your laptop?”

Rush shot him another brief, uninterpretable flicker of a look. “That option is— more difficult. For a number of reasons.”

“I just kind of think you should stay here.”

“I did stay. I washed your dishes. We discussed your internalized homophobia and its accompanying implicit trace of misogyny.”

Young frowned. “No, we didn’t.”

“—I’m leaving,” Rush said.

“I’m not _homophobic_ ,” Young said, feeling vaguely offended. Then, catching up to the conversation: “Look, just— spend the night.”

Rush managed to summon up about half of a smirk. “Feeling the need to prove a point? Unfortunately, the decision to date me did not guarantee you—“

Young said hastily, “That’s not what I meant!” Then he felt the need to backpedal. “Not that I don’t— I mean, I’m not— I definitely— it’s just, that’s not what’s going on here. Right now. At this exact moment.”

He gave up on trying to course-correct, and reached out to put his hand on Rush’s shoulder in some kind of wordless appeal. After a moment, when Rush didn’t protest, he lifted the same hand and hesitantly fitted it against Rush’s sharp-boned jawline. He could feel the soft, scratchy stubble where Rush hadn’t shaved in a few days. It felt good against his palm. He smoothed his thumb over Rush’s cheekbone. Rush held still; he didn’t say anything. The faintest hint of a flush was visible high up on his face. Young could feel the heat of it against his fingers.

He smiled a little without meaning to. “You blush, you know.”

“Shut up,” Rush said immediately.

“You can’t exactly deny it.”

“Fuck you."

“I can see it.”

“It’s genetic; it’s not like I can—“ Rush shut his eyes; his mouth twisted. He fell silent for a moment. “It’s genetic,” he repeated in a low voice.

Young studied him. He could guess what Rush was thinking, or enough, he thought, to understand the room’s suddenly tense air. He risked stroking his thumb over Rush’s cheekbone again, this time trying to communicate reassurance, or something like reassurance— maybe just the fact of his presence, in the face of all the reasons he had not to be present. He could communicate that much, he thought. It didn’t take a genius. He felt Rush turn slightly into his hand, a movement Rush didn’t seem aware of, a tender little flinch of a movement.

“Stay,” Young said.

* * *

Rush got his laptop from his apartment and curled up on the sofa so he could work while Young watched TV— though really Young was watching _Rush_ , for the most part, more than paying attention to the History Channel’s documentary on the Cambridge Spies. The light from the computer reflected off Rush’s glasses, making them look liquid and opaque, which Young found unnerving. Rush seemed restless: shifting, fisting a hand in his hair, and tilting his head to frown at the computer screen. There was something about the behavior that seemed uncharacteristic, though Young couldn’t really pinpoint why— at least, not until he changed the channel to a wildlife documentary during a commercial break and heard Rush humming under his breath. Whatever he was humming didn’t sound like a song. It didn’t sound like anything Young had ever heard.

“Are you— humming?” Young asked hesitantly.

Rush didn’t look up. “No.”

“I’m pretty sure you were humming.”

“Mm.” Rush seemed to consider this the end of the conversation; he sank back into silence.

“Uh,” Young said. He flipped the TV back to the History Channel and set it on mute. “Remember when I asked you if you were hearing something, earlier?”

“I told you I wasn’t.”

“You did, yeah.” Young waited, but once more Rush had clearly decided the conversation was at an end. “You just seem a little distracted.”

“Yes. Distracted by the cipher.”

“Right,” Young said. “The cipher. Right.”

He gave up, at least for the moment, and turned his attention to the TV. The captions clued him into the fact that what he was watching was a reenactment of a meeting between Kim Philby and James Jesus Angleton— the British spy and the man who’d go on to run the CIA. Philby was young, hawkish-looking, intelligent, charming, the star of London’s wartime foreign-service scene. Angleton was shabby, shy. He couldn’t imagine that a man like Philby would ever spy on his own country. He couldn’t imagine why he would. Later it would haunt him, that defection— Philby and Maclean and the rest of the spies. He would never really understand it. He’d become a paranoiac, seeing plots in every corner of the room. The old method of making sense of the world had failed him, and he couldn’t seem to figure out why. And in the end he could never manage to construct a new one. It was easier to believe that there was no sense to be made of the world at all, to give up any attempt at salvaging a through-line.

Young had read about the case, seen a movie based on it, once. Watching the reenactment play out, he doubted that the friendship between Philby and Angleton could have been as dramatic as the History Channel made it look. Bored, he switched back to the wildlife documentary.

Rush was humming again.

“Hotshot,” Young said, trying to sound casual, “what’s that you’re humming?”

Rush said absently, “I hate it when you call me that.”

“Yeah. I know. But—“

“Are you likely to persist in this line of questioning?”

“Probably,” Young said, honest.

“In that case, fine.” Rush sighed and flung his hair back in a sulky, impatient gesture. “I apologize for humming.”

“Can you please just tell me what’s going on?” Young said.

For a minute, he thought Rush wouldn’t— that if he wanted any information, he was going to have to pry it out of Rush with a blunt spoon. He didn’t know if he was prepared to do that, and he didn’t want to have to think about it, to think about Rush as someone he was pitted against. He thought that Rush sensed the incipient standoff, too, and normally that’d be a bad thing; if he knew one thing about Rush, it was that Rush didn’t shy away from a fight.

But unexpectedly, Rush caved. Young could see it in him before he spoke: the slump of his shoulders, an unsettled twisting-away from Young as he dropped his head against the back of the couch, staring towards the deck. “The cipher is,” he said, restlessly tracing the edge of his computer with one finger, “musical. It’s musical.”

Young didn’t understand what that meant. “Musical?”

“Yes, musical. Music. It is. It must be. A sequence of numbers, corresponding to pitches. To understand it, one must presumably understand the Ancient musical system. Their way of thinking about music. Their way of playing it, possibly.”

“And that’s why you’re humming? You’re trying to figure out Ancient music?”

Rush was still facing away from Young. “More or less.”

“And you’re not lying to me? Because I seem to remember you giving me a lecture about that an hour ago.” Young tried to play off his worry with a smile. But he did think Rush was lying to him, and he didn’t know exactly what about.

“I did not _lecture_ you. I suggested that there were benefits to not lying. I never denied that lying might also have its benefits.”

“Great. That’s— that is _exactly_ what I wanted to hear right now.”

Rush made a frustrated noise and shoved his computer onto the coffee table, none-too-gently. He raked a frustrated hand through his hair. “What does it _matter_ what I’m doing? What I’m doing or not doing? Or is this professional curiosity?”

“It’s not,” Young said, taken aback. “Of course it’s not.”

“It certainly feels like it. Why else would you be interested?”

“Uh, because I’m worried about you?”

“Oh, of course you’re _worried_ about me.” Rush pushed himself to his feet in a jerky motion and then stood there, staring down at his computer, his hands curved into fists, managing to communicate an element of agitation even while standing still. “Worried about your resource. Mustn’t let him go unmonitored for a single moment.”

Young stared at him. “You sound crazy right now. You know that, right?”

“I’m not _crazy!_ ” Rush threw the words at Young like he was slamming a door, or overturning a bunch of furniture to serve as a barricade. “I’m not hearing things, I’m not _crazy_ , and I am not— _not—_ a _problem_ for the acting fucking head of the Icarus Project to resolve!”

“No one said you were a problem!”

“Then stop treating me like one!”

“Then stop acting like one!”

“ _Christ!”_ Rush kicked the coffee table, sending a ballpoint pen skittering off its surface. “You can’t even _argue_ competently; you’re like an idiot dog walking itself in placid fucking circles with its own leash in its teeth. You’d look for a frisbee if I pretended to throw it. I really don’t know why I bother.”

For some reason that hit like an unexpected punch to the gut. “Right,” Young said, his throat clenched and hurting. “I mean, I guess I don’t know either. Since obviously _you_ only see me in terms of your work. But that’s what it’s all about, right? _You’re_ the one who’s obsessed with it, not other people. You wish you could be made out of numbers, so you think everyone else in the whole world must want that, and if they say anything else then they’re fucking with you, so— I’m just saying, maybe you should take a long hard look in the mirror before you start talking about whose leash is in whose teeth.”

Rush had closed his eyes almost as soon as Young started speaking. He had his arms crossed over his chest, hands gripping his shoulders. He looked intensely wretched. “I shouldn’t have said that,” he said. “I’ll go.”

He started to reach out for his computer and close it, but Young caught his arm. It was a risk, Young thought, but— a small one, in comparison to all of the day’s other risks. “I don’t want that,” he said. “I don’t want you to be made out of numbers.”

Rush looked down at Young’s hand, resting on his forearm. His eyebrows had drawn together in an achingly perplexed expression. He said at last, in a voice that didn’t know how to pitch itself and ended up mostly sounding confused, “But I do want that.”

“I know,” Young said. “I know you do.”

It occurred to him that Rush had never said as much, at least not directly. It was something that Young must have gleaned from the long rants about nothing human having meaning and Rush’s refusal to ever look after himself, the determination with which he pretended that nothing physical could touch him, whether it was a gun being fired in his direction or an actual, well, touch, which maybe explained a little about why he didn’t like people touching him— because if they did, it was hard for him to pretend that there was no him a touch could get to. In a weird way, Young had always understood.

He thought that if he said as much, Rush wouldn’t believe him; there were a lot of things he said that Rush didn’t seem to hear. So he tightened his grip on Rush’s arm instead, hoping that some part of the message would make the jump between them.

Rush slowly folded back onto the couch. He buried his head in his hands, his fingertips digging into his hair. For a long time he didn’t say anything.

Young waited.

“I’m sleeping here,” Rush said at last, without looking up, spiking his tone with a hint of defiance, as though he were insisting on something that Young might object to, instead of something that Young had suggested in the first place.

“Okay,” Young said. “If the TV bothers you, I can read instead. I could read _to_ you,” he added, a little awkwardly. “If— if it helps.”

Rush shrugged minutely, an almost-invisible movement. Young took it as a yes.

He groped for his reading glasses on the coffee table, then rose painfully to dig out the secondhand paperback of Michael Herr’s _Dispatches_ he’d been in the middle of reading before he moved and got involved in… all of this. An invoice from his divorce lawyer was marking the point where he’d left off. Effortfully, he ignored it as he sank back on the couch.

“Tell me if this bugs you,” he said. “I guess.” He looked down at the page. “ _Varieties of religious experience, good news and bad news,”_ he read. “ _A lot of men found their compassion in the war, some found it and couldn’t live with it, war-washed shutdown of feeling, like who gives a fuck. People retreated into positions of hard irony, cynicism, despair, some saw the action and declared for it, only heavy killing could make them feel so alive. And some just went insane, followed the black-light arrow around the bend and took possession of the madness that that had been waiting there in trust for them for eighteen or twenty-five or fifty years. Every time there was combat you had a license to go maniac, everyone snapped over the line at least once there and nobody noticed, they hardly noticed if you forgot to snap back again.”_

Rush still had his head in his hands, but he hadn’t asked Young to stop.

Very gingerly, feeling like Rush might still run if he made any sudden movements, Young shifted the book to one hand and placed the other on Rush’s back. He could feel all the tense muscles there bunched and shivering, like they were just waiting for an excuse to jolt into action. After a while, under the weight of Young’s touch, they seemed to very slowly subside.

* * *

Young had been reading for almost an hour when Rush fell asleep, a slow slump against the couch that took the length of several sentences. Young was relieved; his voice was becoming hoarse, and he himself was tired.

Tired, he thought, and worried about Rush.

He pried himself up off the sofa— grimacing as his hip gave a jolt of pain and threatened to just plain give— and tugged at the Pendleton blanket draped over its back till the heavy wool cloth was covering Rush. Carefully, he eased Rush’s glasses off and set them on the coffee table; then stood looking down at Rush. Rush looked tense even in his sleep, like he was braced against something he was dreaming about. His limp hands were still trying to hold the shape of fists.

He hadn’t said anything the whole time that Young was reading. He’d staying in pretty much the same position, hunched over and miserable-looking, while Young’s hand traced slow steady circles on his back. That was, like, multiple levels of un-Rush-like behavior. If he was mad at Young or really wanting to work on his goddamn cipher or upset about the whole kissing… thing, he would’ve been pacing around and trying to do property damage, talking nonstop. Probably yelling. Even when he’d had a panic attack (or whatever it was that had happened) after the Lucian Alliance tried to kidnap him, he’d just yelled a lot, tried to leave, and then keeled over. He hadn’t been _still_ , and he definitely hadn’t let Young try to help him, which in Rush-world was as good as admitting he needed help. Hell, it was like calling fucking 9-1-1 in Rush-world.

Young couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong with him.

He smoothed the blanket over Rush’s shoulder, uselessly. Rush didn’t stir.

If there was something wrong with Rush, he ought to— what? Take him to the Mountain? To Lam, who was a sweet and moral person, but who sat on Committee #6? Was that the right thing to do? There was always Jackson, who would care less about whether there was something wrong with Rush than with using it as an excuse to sink the Icarus Project. Landry would want to lock Rush up— the bunker, finally, for Rush’s own wellbeing. Wray would surely have to mention the issue of human rights, but how far would she follow through? Everyone on the committee had an agenda, and Young wasn’t sure what all of them were, except that they centered around the regulation of the tenuous body currently curled up asleep on his couch.

He turned away towards his bedroom, massaging his temple with one hand.

There had been a few hours earlier, at Genesee and after, when he’d felt a surge of optimism, or something like optimism, but more present in his body, more immediate, more real. He had done something he wasn’t supposed to, but he felt like he had done something good. In the face of all his failures, his misunderstandings, his mind that couldn’t manage to be fast and his body that wasn’t and would never be strong, he’d set out to do one thing— to tell Rush something. Maybe he hadn’t known what it was he wanted to tell Rush, exactly, and that was where the kiss had come in— as much of a surprise to him as it had been to Rush. He had the sense that something within him had cracked open like an egg, not there at the park but over some longer time period, and inside the imprisoning shell of that egg had been the instinct he’d always lacked, the instinct that other people had, that told them how to feel and how to be a person who felt things, that told them how to be good. Good enough.

He wanted to be good enough.

In his bedroom, he shed his jeans and shirt and collapsed onto the mattress. The ceiling seemed overwritten with shadows, tree branches that didn’t look like tree branches, moving with the stir of the wind. It was a writing he couldn’t read. He felt illiterate, confused.

“I’m supposed to be in charge,” he whispered to the dark.

The dark didn’t answer.

He rolled over and pulled his knees to his chest like a child, covering his face with his hands, and slept.

* * *

“Young.”

Young had been dreaming. In the dream, he was crawling through red dust under the ring-split sky of Sest Bet, but there were two versions of him, like the white band of orbiting debris had split him into two people, one for each side of the sky. He was both of the bodies and they both hurt, but in slightly different ways. He couldn’t figure out the difference. Maybe they were mirror images. Maybe one was a ghost. _Hell if I’m gonna let you haunt me, Young_ , David had said. David kept trying to push the two parts of him together, mash them into one body, but he couldn’t ever seem to make it work. They wouldn’t fit.

“Young.”

Someone was shaking his shoulder. He thought it was David at first, trying to shove him back in his own body. He hurt enough that it made sense for him to be on Sest Bet. And his mouth was dry. But the air that he was breathing wasn’t noxious and his hands were not stained with red dirt.

He blinked.

“ _Young_.”

Young turned, making a pained and half-awake noise. Rush was crouched at his bedside, eyes large and luminous and feverish in the dark.

“What’s wrong?” Young asked, snapping to alertness. He glanced at his bedside clock. It read _3:52 AM_ in crisp electronic red numbers. An emergency hour; that was how he thought of it, when there was no other reason for someone to be awake.

Rush regarded him with an intense and urgent expression. “I need a piano,” he whispered.

Young stared at him.

Rush stared back.

“You _what_ ,” Young said.

“I need a piano,” Rush repeated.

Young said, “It’s four AM.”

Rush spared a distracted look at the clock. “This is important.”

Young buried his face in his pillow and groaned. “Rush—“

“It can be an upright. It doesn’t have to be a good one.”

“I guarantee you,” Young said, his voice muffled by cotton and feathers, “that there is no piano in the entire state of Colorado, good or not, that is publicly available at four AM.”

“I thought, perhaps at the Mountain.”

“There is not a _piano_ at a secure underground Air Force base.”

“Well—“ Rush frowned. “That seems like an unaccountable oversight.”

Young made a muted noise of frustration and heaved himself onto his back. “I am not getting you a piano in the middle of the night.”

Rush’s brown furrowed. He seemed confused. “But I need one.”

“I feel like you’re about to learn an important lesson.”

“What’s that?” The question had every appearance of sincerity, which was a little unnerving.

“That, in the words of those great rock’n’roll prophets, the Rolling Stones, you can’t always get what you want.” Young rolled back over, facing away from Rush. He shut his eyes determinedly.

Rush poked him in the shoulder with a finger. “Young.”

“I’m going back to sleep.”

“Young. Your quote was selectively truncated. I believe it is also suggested that you might find you get what you need.”

“Yeah, unless it’s a piano at 4 AM in Colorado.”

Rush had balanced his elbows on the bed and was leaning forward insistently, his breath practically ghosting past Young’s ear. “I need—“

Young punched the pillow next to him. “I will,” he said in a tightly controlled voice, “get you a piano. In the morning.”

Rush was silent for a moment. Then he said, “What am I meant to do till then?”

“Uh, sleep? Like a normal human being?”

Rush didn’t say anything. After a while, Young glanced over his shoulder and saw that Rush was still sitting there, balanced on his heels beside the bed, biting his lip. He looked lost, as though he genuinely couldn’t imagine how he was supposed to interpret what Young had said.

Young sighed. He turned back towards Rush, got a good grip on his forearms, and gently tugged him up onto the bed. Rush went slowly: at first confused as to what was happening and off-balance, then resisting slightly, then giving in and lurching forwards.

He landed halfway on top of Young, which was unexpected. The weight of him pushed all the air out of Young. For a second he just stared at Rush’s wide-eyed, startled face, breathless. There was a kind of charge between them that wasn’t sexual in nature. Maybe it would’ve been if Young weren’t so physically battered and tired; there was a little of that heat, the automatic friction. But mostly what Young felt was almost altitude-sick. It was like he couldn’t breathe in the air, even after he got used to Rush’s weight pushing down on his lungs. It was too thin and pure, like the air on top of a mountain. He was stupid and dizzy and warm-faced.

“Sleep,” he said, his voice low and gravelly with that feeling. He wrapped his arms around Rush.

Rush shifted anxiously. “Why are you so loud?” he whispered. “You’re loud; you must be loud; how else could you—“

“Shh,” Young said. He pressed his face into Rush’s shoulder, and Rush sighed.

“In the morning,” Rush said— a questioning note coloring his tone.

“Yeah. In the morning.”

Seeming somewhat reassured, Rush laid his head down against Young’s chest.

* * *

They slept like that. Young dreamed— he didn’t know what he dreamed, exactly. At one point he was back on Sest Bet again, and tied to a table where something was being cut out of him. It didn’t hurt, but he was aware of whatever-it-was leaving his body. Desolation seized him; he writhed and fought on the table. He was excruciatingly aware that he would never, ever get it back. They were going to make a new him, he thought, and then who would he be? But abruptly for some reason Rush was there, tangling long fingers in his hair and whispering facts about meteors and jellyfish and buffalo, using terms that Young didn’t always understand. “It’s all right,” Rush whispered. “It’s all right.” He started to describe some type of crustacean that lived at the very bottom of the Marianas Trench. This seemed like typical Rush behavior, so much so that, even in the dream, Young smiled.

He woke after that and couldn’t figure out why he’d awakened, for a second. He squinted around at the mostly-darkened room. Then he realized that Rush— the limp weight breathing steadily against his breastbone— was humming in his sleep. It sounded like the same sequence of notes he’d been humming earlier, but blurrier this time. The blurriness didn’t make them comforting. There was something _off_ about them, like they were out of tune or came from the folk tradition of some isolated valley on the other side of the world. Rush kept drowsily repeating the same sequence. He didn’t seem to realize.

Young looked over at the clock. _7:58 AM_ , it said.

He sighed. His leg hurt; his hip hurt; his back hurt. It was the deep and resigned ache that wasn’t spasm, exactly, but something more lasting that wasn’t going to be easily fixed. And Rush was humming, unable even in his sleep to escape whatever it was that was going on with him, which he was maybe encouraging, contributing to, welcoming, because that was _Rush_ , that was the kind of shit he did, because he wanted to be made of numbers and no longer be a body whose heart could beat restlessly somewhere in the vicinity of Young’s ribs.

Young stroked Rush’s hair. It still felt like a forbidden gesture. He felt certain he’d be punished for doing it. Maybe the difference was that he’d realized he could take the punishment. That he could do it, and be punished, and that was an option; that there was life beyond the limit. A good life. A life where what he did was good.

Rush twitched and flinched against Young, coming alert. Maybe he could sense when he was being thought about. He probably disapproved.

He blinked up at Young. “Piano,” he said muzzily, fingers digging into the front of Young’s shirt like little cat-claws.

Young winced and sighed. “Yeah, yeah.”

For a moment, Rush laid his head against Young’s chest again. “I could hear it when I was sleeping,” he murmured. “But now I can’t.”

“That’s— good, right?” Young asked carefully. “If you were hearing things, that’d be kind of… worrying.”

Abruptly, Rush pushed himself up and away, clambering out of the bed. “Yes, of course. I’m not an idiot, you know. I am, in fact, something of a genius. I’m not mentally deranged.”

“That’s not what I was saying.”

“It’s immaterial,” Rush said. He raked his hair back. He was facing away from Young. “I am quite mentally sane and require a piano.”

Young, who had lifted his head up to watch Rush, let it drop to the pillow. “You know— I thought you hated music.”

Rush had placed one hand on the white frame of the door. “I do.”

“But you were humming in your sleep. And you want a piano.”

“Oh…” Rush hadn’t turned around. “Don’t you think there are times when…” He paused. “When you want something so much, when it’s what you were made for, when it’s what you were made to _do_ , like time running backwards to reunite two continents that had split apart, or finding what fits the asteroid’s impact crater, the exact fit, and you have to discard all the old prohibitions, because suffering is incidental in the face of what you will gain. Necessary, perhaps. To burn away the inessential accretions. Everything you wished that you could finally shed.”

Young watched him. Rush’s shoulders were slightly hunched, like he didn’t want to say what he was saying, but was forcing it out anyway. “Yeah,” Young said. “I guess there are those times.”

He knew that there were. It was what he himself was feeling. That burning-through all his accumulated fears to get to the real, the good.

It didn’t occur to him until much later that he might not have understood what Rush was saying— that he might not have understood any of it.


	28. Chapter 28

Rush stared at the piano.

It was not a good piano. Well: it was an upright, its action disorientated and its strings no doubt slightly out of tune. Its wood was discoloured and its frame slightly lopsided. It lived in a bar, for God’s sake. That was where Young had brought him, to a fucking bar that stank as all bars and pubs stank with a day-scent that reminded Rush of torn ancient velvet or chipped gilt railings. There was something ghostly about objects that existed to be touched and then spent half their lives abandoned.

Like the piano.

He did not want to touch it.

He was hearing Satie’s _Gnossiennes_ , but not quite. Not _quite_. There was something wrong with them. He could not seem to bring the notes into the correct alignment. This was one was too sharp, that one was too flat. They did not make _sense_ as music made sense, incisive and correct in its motions, as precise and exquisite as the language of math. Words had no such relationship with each other. Words were as much vapour as the mounds of cloud that colonised the sky of Colorado, illusive and ultimately adumbrative. Music was superior.

But he did not want to make music.

Perhaps he did not want to make music because he understood what it was to make music.

Always, always, words allowed one to obfuscate. Other people identified this obfuscation as a flaw in him, but it was a flaw in the words. In the language.

Perhaps he did not want to make music because—

He shut his eyes.

 _not-C5, not-Eflat5, not-D5, not-C5, not-C5, not-B4, not-C5, not-B4_.

He felt certain that if he looked over his shoulder, towards the corner of the room he could not quite see from this position, at the very edge of his peripheral vision, she would be there. Rosining her bow or frowning at a sheaf of music, her violin held absently under her chin. There was a mark there that all violinists had, a small patch of roughness that looked like a bruise or a stain. It fascinated him, that mark. He liked to touch it, to feel the curious way that all the years of work had left her not-quite-wounded. _Does it hurt?_ he had asked once, when they had hardly known each other. _No_ , she had said, frowning at him as though he were quite stupid. _Why would I spend so much time doing something that hurt?_ He had not known what to say in return. It was not that he knew she would not like his answers; he himself could not arrange them into an order that seemed to make any sense.

She was not in the corner of the room.

She was not anywhere.

 _not-C5, not-Eflat5, not-D5, not-C5, not-E5, not-F5, not-E5, not-F5_.

She had not liked the first _Gnossienne._ She had said that it sounded like someone going quietly mad.

 _Let us the land which Heav’n appoints, explore_  
_Appease the winds, and seek the Gnossian shore._

The shore that had once played host to an empire— almost certainly deserted by the age of Aeneas, but the height of civilisation before it collapsed. Home to labyrinths and elaborate, peculiar paintings, languages that no one now could fully decrypt. Perhaps to walk there was to go mad, at least a little. Perhaps Satie had _wanted_ to go mad. To enter into the mystery and in doing so gain access. To be tuned. A hard and inhuman hand taking a hold of the boxwood peg and beginning to _wrench—_

“Rush,” Young said from somewhere over Rush’s shoulder. “Are you going to play this thing, or what?”

“Yes,” Rush said. His voice sounded strange to him.

“Because you were pretty insistent about me finding a piano for you.”

“I appreciate the effort.”

Young was silent for a moment. “Are you sure you’re okay? That was, uh, a very un-you thing to say.”

Rush rested the tips of his fingers against the cool piano keys. “I can be gracious.”

“I’m sure you _can_ ; you just aren’t. Typically.”

Rush ignored him. He could feel the entirety of the piano’s action, the assemblage he could access by depressing the keys. He pictured in his head: the hammers, the levers, the strings. He was not sure he could set that action in motion. If he did, he thought— if he did—

Something would happen. The hand would reach inside him and touch him. It would take him by the scruff of the neck and he would find himself on the Gnossian shore.

That was what he wanted, wasn’t it? He wanted to not be himself. He wanted to wake, amnesiac and naked, in a new and/or an unmade world.

That was why he had come here. He had thought that perhaps the piano— that if he could approximate the melody line that had been running without cessation through his head—

(he _was not crazy_ , but perhaps he was a little crazy, but only in the way that one had to go a little mad if one wished to enter the labyrinths of Knossos, and what did it mean, anyway, going mad?)

—then he would understand its deviations and could plot its pitches. He would understand the technical structure of the music. He could solve the cypher, and that was what he wanted. And if he was lucky, really really lucky, perhaps they would hurl him through space to the furthest destination that had ever been touched by man.

He flinched as Young’s hand rested on his shoulder.

“Whatever this is you’re doing,” Young said, “you don’t have to do it.”

Young’s body itself seemed to have a pitch. He vibrated at a frequency. It was warm and calm and steady. It muted other things. But this was not the desired effect. One could not simply have what one wanted. To have what one wanted was—

He produced a note on the piano, a sliver of a note, an E flat.

—to have something of which one could be divested. You opened yourself to diminishment. To have nothing was easier. And of course one did not have nothing. There was what you carried in the one box that could not be opened, protected by the lock that no one could break. _Banhus_ , the Anglo-Saxons had called the body; the bone-house, and what lived there could not be evicted. It was the only thing that couldn’t be.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid you don’t understand. I do.”

He began to play.

It was a poor approximation of the music that he had been hearing. He had put the _Gnossiennes_ out of his head. This was not music that was meant for the piano. He did not know, yet, for what instrument it was meant. He searched out its rhythms— sensed there were counterrhythms that he could not produce, that ought to act as foundations. The melodic line felt stark, stripped. He found he could not stand its obvious pitchiness; the further he went, the more he played, the more he was aware of the essential insufficiency of the piano’s set band of notes. He could not hear the piano’s notes as notes, not any longer. He could hear them only as the notes they were not, their distance from the notes he needed, the notes he ought to have been playing. He could not seem to focus enough to consider the exact frequency of those other notes, the _real_ notes of which the piano provided only imperfect translations. It occurred to him that he had not always thought this was so. There had been a time when he could sit at the piano and utilise its keys to produce phrases, sentences, sonatas of perfect beauty, and he had not known that there were these other tones, the tones that lay between the tones he was used to, or, if he had known, he had not understood how they might fit together, the rules, the grammar that they might use. How could he not have known?

His head hurt. He felt he was hearing with a complexity that had all his life been denied to him. He did not know _how_ he was hearing, exactly. It was not via the usual mechanism. He felt as though he were a radio receiver, and he had not previously known this about himself. It was like discovering a vestigial organ that one hadn’t suspected, and wasn’t supposed to have. The body was possessed of these secret infrastructures.How did you know yourself; how well did you know yourself? Had you ever actually engaged in an anatomization? Peeled the skin back and cracked open the ribs?

Perhaps _that_ was what he had wanted. To break the cypher of his body.

And it was starting to break at last.

_Gloria trailed her fingers in the fountain. “What do you think is behind the second door?” she asked._

He was in the courtyard and he was also not in the courtyard. He could feel—

_“Do you think it’s something marvellous?” She had very short fingernails, because of playing the violin. But she liked to keep them beautiful. It was something she’d been brought up with, this philosophy of elegance in all things. He could see it in the flick of her fingers as she shook off the water. A few drops still beaded her fingertips._

He couldn’t tolerate the wrongness, was the problem.

_“One must beware, though, of what is marvellous. The two things come together, monsters and marvels. Or are they in fact one and the same? It’s an interesting philosophical question.”_

He couldn’t tolerate his own wrongness.

_“I can fix it for you, darling. You know what the problem is.”_

He wasn’t tuned correctly.

_“Yes.”_

Yes. He wanted to be in tune.

_“You’ve wanted it all your life, but you never found a pitch that you could tune to. The string of you would have broken; you weren’t made for it. But not this time.”_

He wanted her to—

_She knew before he had the thought, as so often she had done. The door was already singing to her._

_As all things in the world sang._

_The noise_  
_was a spectrum_  
_a sea of leaky strata_  
_clines among clines_  
_a pelagic zone_  
_in which_  
_he was_  
_floating_

_He felt lightheaded._

He felt lightheaded.

His palms were sweating.

His fingers left damp marks on the keys.

He wasn’t playing the piano anymore. He staggered up from the battered bench and dug his fingers under the first of the instrument’s panels in search of the latches that would let him lift the panel off. He did so and exposed the hammers. They were covered with a patina of dust that seemed consistent with the piano’s degree of disuse. It smelt faintly of the Wild West. He felt and groped for the springs for the lower panel. He was aware of voices engaged in conversation behind him. The conversation did not strike him as interesting.

“I’m going to need,” he said vaguely, “a screwdriver of some sort, and—“

There were other things he needed, but they were rather specialised. He wondered if perhaps a ratchet spanner would do the trick. It was not a very good piano. He need not worry overmuch about doing damage.

“Rush,” someone said. Young. He was identifiable by his pitch. “What the hell are you doing?”

He had thought that was obvious. “Retuning it. I’ll need a ratchet spanner.”

“It, uh— it sounded pretty in-tune already,” Young said.

“No. It can’t make the sounds I need.”

“Right. Okay. And what sounds are those?”

Rush trailed a finger along the row of hammers, stirring up the Wild-West dust. “Sounds.”

“Uh-huh.” Young appeared sceptical for some reason.

“It’s very important that I recreate them.”

“To solve the cypher.”

“Yes.” He felt in his pockets for anything that he might use to tune the piano. Regrettably, he was not a practical man, or had not been so recently. The life of the mind, and so on.

“Rush,” Young said, “you can’t just go around retuning other people’s pianos.”

This seemed rather less of a moral precept and more of a nitpick.

Rush blinked and attempted to focus on Young. This was challenging because he was still hearing the music and it had become much more difficult to tolerate; he thought it had become much more difficult to tolerate, assuming he could rely on his perception, but no, yes, it had certainly become more difficult to tolerate, because it was loud or because it was clearer, although he also thought it was possible that he was not detecting parts of his surroundings, for instance he had not been aware that the bar owner, or someone in a position of management, was now involved in this confrontation, standing a little apart from Young; Rush supposed that in becoming receptive to whatever it was that he was receiving, he had sacrificed some other areas of receptivity, such as receptivity to the audiovisual cues of the movements of bar owners, but in his opinion this seemed like more than a fair trade.

Young, though, appeared concerned. His brow was furrowed.

Rush reached out in an attempt to reassure him, cupping his hand hesitantly around Young’s upper arm. His intent was to then inform Young in a comforting tone of voice that he could, in fact, go around retuning other people’s pianos, presuming that a ratchet spanner was provided to him. However, the point of contact between himself and Young seemed to act as an amplifier of some sort, conveying Young’s frequency in a manner that faintly muted, as usual, all others. Rush found this disorientating; the air itself seemed to undergo a shift around him. He felt dizzy and faintly nauseated, but for some reason he clung to Young’s arm as he sank rapidly onto the bench.

“What’s wrong?” Young demanded.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

It was only that the entirety of the earth seemed full of noise, and he too was constituted by soundwaves instead of matter, and he was trying to hold himself together in a world whose dominant pitch was in the wrong tuning, and it was really, just really very extremely difficult; how could Young not perceive this?

“I just— feel a bit dizzy,” he said.

Young’s jaw worked. “Right. We’re going home. No more retuning pianos.”

“No,” Rush agreed, vaguely puzzled as to why he had been considering such a thing when it would be so much simpler to devise an instrument that natively produced the tones he sought.

“You think you can stand up?”

“Of course I can stand up.”

He couldn’t. He folded back onto the piano bench before he had made it upright, and was then forced to endure the indignity of Young’s hand on the back of his neck, pressing his head between his knees.

“I’m not an invalid,” he said, his voice muffled.

“Sure,” Young said tolerantly, and ruffled his hair. “Not dead, either. Just resting.”

“I refuse to believe that you have ever seen an episode of _Monty Python._ ”

“I have hidden depths,” Young said.

His hand was warm where it weighed against Rush’s neck. Rush closed his eyes and let himself be pressed down like that, into the respite of not-quite-silence in which he was not so conscious of the seasick-making rising and falling surges of noise in the air.

When he raised his head again and squinted at Young, he saw that Young did not perhaps feel so casual as he had pretended to be. His eyes searched Rush’s face, frayed with wrinkles at their corners.

“What’s going on?” Young said in a low voice.

Rush shrugged limply. “I’m coming down with flu?”

It was true that his head was pounding. He felt—

Wrong. Ironic, now that the music had finally come right for him, and he understood it, understood the notes he would need and why they sounded as they did, the structure behind it. But with that knowledge had come a concomitant incomprehension of his body. Had it changed? Or had his perception? Something had altered or was altering.

He could be right or the music could be right but they could not both be right at the same time. This appeared to be axiom.

Young sighed. “Are you gonna barf in my car if I drag you out of here?”

“As a retributive act, you mean? The thought hadn’t occurred.” Rush tried to look as though he were considering it, when in fact it was difficult for him to think about things that fit within his former parameters. The thoughts felt the wrong shape. He remembered the DHD on the shoreline, how he had felt in his bones that it was, in a way he couldn’t articulate, somehow obscured.

Not in his bones. His DNA.

“Well,” Young said, sounding resigned, “I guess I’ll take my chances. Come on.”

He got his hands around Rush’s shoulders and carefully helped attain a seated position, then more or less bodily lifted him and balanced him on his feet. Rush was strongly of a mind to protest, probably by pointing out that Young was meant to _use_ his crutches rather than tuck them under one arm, but at the same time he felt drained by the act of staying upright. The whole world seemed to have tilted at an angle to him. He could not hold it in his head with the music at the same time.

Young conveyed some amount of money to the steward of the piano, or whatever was the title of the gentleman who presumably was going to have to restore the panels that Rush had disassembled. The two of them had a brief conversation with their eyes. Young appeared to come away the victor, and escorted Rush out of the bar without incident.

The Colorado sun that met their exit was overly blinding. This could not be autumn, Rush thought. He shielded his eyes, recoiling against Young.

Young did not appear to notice, and continued dragging Rush forwards. “That’s one more bar I can never go back to,” he said. “Thanks for that.” He opened the passenger-side door of his truck and boosted Rush up into it.

Rush let himself go limp in the warm leather cradle of the seat, because the windscreen was tinted and this meant that there was a diminishment of light. He removed his glasses and covered his eyes in spite of this.

“Are there many bars you’re banned from?” he asked, when Young took the opposite seat and started the engine.

Young maintained a guilty silence for a moment.

“Ah,” Rush said.

“In my defense,” Young said, “I usually didn’t start the fights. And I was in college.”

“In Wyoming,” Rush murmured. Since Young had ceased to touch him, he had begun to find it more difficult to hold his surroundings in place around him. The music, the metallophonic sequence of rising and falling, was so much clearer and more present.

“Right,” Young said. “In Wyoming.”

There was another silence.

“Rush,” Young said quietly.

“Mm?”

“This isn’t— whatever’s wrong, whatever’s going on that you won’t tell me about— is it because of me?”

Rush examined the question, probed at it from varying directions. He said warily, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I took you on that trip. And you started acting weird on the way back.”

“I was not acting _weird._ There is nothing _wrong_ with me.”

“Right,” Young said, quite clearly humouring him.

“There’s nothing _wrong_ with me!” Rush said again, more loudly than he had meant to. Too late, he realised that his heart was beating hard, and his hands had closed into fists. “—And if there were,” he said belatedly, into the dead air, “it would not be _because of you_ , as though you— what— cast an evil spell on me, or infected me with a virus of some sort, as though you’re _capable_ of affecting me in _any way,_ which is certainly, _certainly, categorically_ not the case; it’s only that I expend a great deal of effort _keeping things in the right places_ , numbers and music and memories and dreams, a _great_ deal of effort, and it’s… harder, possibly, since I broke the eighth cypher, there’s more to partition, and distractions are— it doesn’t mean there’s something _wrong_ with me, and at any rate, it couldn’t be a more absurd proposition to start with, as you mitigate against it, which is not, if you’re interested, at all remotely helpful in re: actually solving the fucking cypher, not that I expect you to care; all it does is _muffle_ things and make me want to _stay_ _still_ , which is the opposite of what I ought to be doing; it’s what _you_ do, it’s the whole _nature_ of you, you and your fucking— your _pitch_!”

On this note, he let fly an explosive fist against the door, which accomplished not very much, except to scrape his knuckles raw.

Young let a moment pass. A traffic light changed; the car turned. “So there’s definitely something wrong,” he said finally, “but I help.”

“I didn’t say that.” Rush had his head in his hands. The motion of objects outside the vehicle was making him feel sick. He didn’t understand how such complex patterns could be executed in perfect coordination but ever-so-slightly discordant, all to the same degree. He wished to be in a dark room with Young touching his hair softly. He wished he had never met Young. He had a sense of his own thoughts spreading wider and wider, like the stars of some expanding universe, approaching a state of perfect entropy. He said at last, “You don’t hurt.”

They had reached the car park of the apartment complex. The sun was still insistent, radiant and excessive.

Young waited a moment after parking before turning the car off. He was squinting past the tinted windscreen, at the coppering foliage, or else at something Rush could not see. “Well, that’s more than I usually manage,” he said wearily, “so I guess I’ll take it.”

Rush did not know what to say to him.

* * *

It was like, he decided later, as he was attempting to cook dinner, the opposite of being laid siege to. The music he was hearing came from within him; from inside the city walls. It had always been there. Now it sought to bring those walls down, but the direction of the assault did not really matter, because either way the walls _would_ come down, and then there would be no city. Only its nomad pieces, dispersed across the transitory landscape, dying without written history and lost to the sands.

His cells in Atlantis, exposed to the electromagnetic waveforms of Ancient technology and responding as though they were alive, which they were, they were alive, although they were no longer strictly speaking him.

He stared down at the cutting board that he was currently utilizing. As a form of concession to the fact that the morning had been a challenging one for Young, he had opted to reinterpret a conventional American classic, and was currently depicting Joan Miró’s _Danseuse II_ in the form of a deconstructed BLT: a wedge of tomato as the red heart of the dancer’s pelvis, a white Belgian endive leaf as her head, with a sliver of black olive acting its shadow, and strips of crisp bacon as the limbs on which she perilously balanced. A drizzle of balsamic vinegar and olive oil formed her spiralling counterpart.

But he wished he had not thought of the painting. There was something about the precariousness of the dancer that unnerved him. He did not like how much weight depended on the brushstrokes of those stick-thin legs. And the shape of the pelvis reminded him of Young. Young and all his broken bones.

He didn’t even care for bacon.

The music battered against him.

He was fairly, but not entirely certain, that the musical system utilised 22 tones.

_“Why twenty-two, do you think?” Gloria asked mildly. “It seems a strange number. They liked for things to come in threes.”_

It was not unknown as a structure on Earth. Classical Indian music was based upon a 22-tone scale.

_“Still. Ternary. It’s something to think about.”_

There were instruments in a gamelan that could produce seven tones, but in any given performance only drew on five. Perhaps some tones were not played, so that the practical number of tones differed from the theoretical model.

_“A ghost note,” Gloria said._

Yes. Never played, but always present. Real-and-not-real. Confined to the realm of possibility.

_“Ghost notes, maybe.”_

No. 21 was 7x3. That felt right. Two primes. Sacred numbers. Balanced. 21 tones, and one with an ambivalent existence.

He listened to the shivering quasi-metallic chimes and tracked the lower line, with its stabilizing rhythms. They off-set the higher instruments, arriving at odd moments that nevertheless felt obscurely necessary. How many instruments were involved? There was more to understand than the frequencies themselves; there were other elements at play here, the timbre, the shapes of notes—

“Uh,” Young said, coming up behind him, “you know your toast is burning, right?”

Rush flinched, startled out of his singular focus.

He had not, in fact, known. He ignored Young spitefully and attempted to salvage the toast. With the burnt bits scraped off, it was serviceable as a sop for the sandwich innards. He cut each slice of white bread into very small precise triangles and lined the meticulously designed plates with them.

Young regarded his plate dubiously when Rush set it in front of him at the table. “I feel like I’m not smart enough to understand this food.”

“There’s nothing to understand.” Rush listlessly swirled a triangle of bread through the oil and vinegar spirals, collapsing their structure and momentum. He still felt faintly nauseated; he had no particular desire to eat.

“Pretty sure there is.” Young studied the plate, his head slightly tilted. “It looks like a stick figure. A stick figure flamingo person, balancing on one leg. Or running really fast. Yeah. Running.”

“Dancing,” Rush said, although he had resolved not to respond to Young’s clumsy and labourious interpretive attempts.

“Dancing,” Young repeated. His brow creased. “I don’t know why I thought running.”

“Perhaps there isn’t much dancing in your life.”

“No,” Young said. He was still staring at the ballerina.. He reached out with his fork and touched the heart-shaped tomato. “Not much running either, lately.”

Rush plucked his own dancer’s wire-thin leg from the plate and took a determined bite of bacon. “Try an alternative form of transportation,” he said.

“That’s harder than it sounds.”

“Is it?” The chimes hammered away at Rush’s cortex. “I suppose it’s an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.” He realised that he was quoting a poem, his under-siege thoughts colliding in new and frantic disorganisations. “I do it so it feels like hell,” he said. “I guess you could say I’ve a call. It’s easy enough to do in a cell.” He forced himself to stop, breathing unsteadily, and pressed a hand to his temple. “Fuck. I don’t even care for Sylvia Plath.”

Young regarded him with an unreadable expression. “Was that a quote from something?”

“Yes.”

“I’m worried about you. You know that, right?”

“I’m becoming aware.”

A note of frustration crept into Young’s voice. “I don’t get why you won’t just— tell me what’s wrong.”

_“Perhaps if you could do it in music,” Gloria said._

“Quite simply, because there is nothing wrong with me, and—“

_“But you buried music, didn’t you? Perhaps that’s why it’s now trying to break the walls down.”_

Distracted, Rush missed a beat and then found his way back to the sentence. “—and it’s offensive, frankly, for every person I meet to go on about how there must be, asking if I worry about ending up like John Nash some day, or whether I know the rates of serious mental illness in individuals of extraordinarily high intelligence, as though I’m a suicide bomber whose target is myself, and as such I must always be handled with extra care; as though they’re looking at the ghost of me from the future, and evaluating me on its behalf. Ought they or ought they not to lock me in a bunker?”

“No one’s going to lock you in a bunker,” Young said.

_“Most people did think that, after I died, you’d go mad.” She was tapping out the dominant rhythm of the music on the rim of the fountain with restless fingers. “As though I was the bunker you were being kept in. They didn’t really understand.”_

“No,” Rush said, and didn’t know to whom he was responding. It was becoming difficult to track the two conversations, difficult to be in the courtyard and not be in the courtyard. “You’re clearly not worried about it. You think there’s something wrong with my brain, possibly that I’ve simply gone mad, but you haven’t attempted to chivvy me into seeking medical care, which is _clearly_ the behavior of a man possessed of a clear and untroubled faith in the personages who would supply that medical care, and what they might resort to if granted control of me.”

Young looked abruptly away, his jaw tightening. It was obvious that Rush’s sudden instinct had been correct.

Rush said, “I’m not mad. Everything that is happening is what _must_ happen.”

“For you to break the last cypher.”

“Yes.”

“Rush—“ Young turned back to him, looking tormented. “The Ancients made them for themselves. They weren’t meant to be solved by someone human.”

_Gloria said, “He’s right, you know.”_

“I know that,” Rush said.

He hadn’t been tuned correctly.

Now he was more in tune.

“Doesn’t that… worry you a little bit?” It clearly worried Young, and Rush did feel for him in a distant sense. His intent had never been to cause Young pain. It seemed to be an epiphenomenon of everything he did. He did not know how to balance his desire not to hurt Young with his essential nature, this thing for which he had been made, and which compelled him forwards with a gravity that there was no escaping. He did not think Young would understand. There was no way to explain.

“No,” he said. It was true and it wasn’t. “Perhaps I value the state of being human less than you do.”

“What do you value, then?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Young was really asking. His blunt face was stripped of any anger or deceit.

Rush thought. An honest question deserved an honest answer. “I suppose I’m waiting to see,” he said.

He meant that he was waiting for the cypher to be decrypted, and for the nine-chevron address to be dialed. He wasn’t sure if this communicated itself in his statement: the idea of something he loved already, without its coming-into-existence. It was perhaps too abstract a concept for Young to grasp. But Rush was abruptly too tired to elucidate it any further. Tired of the conversation, tired of the swells of music in his head.

He stood. “I’m taking one of your painkillers,” he said. “I have a headache. Let’s leave the dishes and go to bed.”

“You’re not taking one of my painkillers,” Young said. But he didn’t question the other declarations. His eyes flicked to Rush, a little uncertain, and away again.

“If you want me to sleep, I am.”

“What are you going to get up to if you’re not sleeping?” Young sounded suspicious rather than suggestive. Still, Gloria said:

_“Do you suppose he’s flirting with you?”_

Rush didn’t. He imagined that Young flirted somewhat in the manner of a buffalo, with a distinct lack of subtlety. “I’m going to work on the cypher,” he said. “Of course. Whatever did you imagine?”

 _“Are_ you _flirting with_ him? _”_

Young sighed. “You can have _half_ a Percocet. And only because I know it’ll put you out.”

_“If so, it seems to have gone over his head.”_

Rush wondered if it was considered bad manners to flirt with a man you were technically dating whilst carrying on a conversation with an hallucination of your dead wife.

_“Oh, darling,” Gloria said. She sounded sad. “Do you think I’d mind?”_

Of course, she _wasn’t_ Gloria— an important distinction. Her sentiments, and more importantly her goals, might not be her own.

_“True,” Gloria agreed. “But regardless of my possibly nefarious motives, I’m dead. It’s not the same as being alive. One’s priorities are different. One’s rights and responsibilities shift.”_

And what about the rights and responsibilities that the living owed to the dead?

_“Go to sleep, Nick.”_

It troubled him. He rose from the table and followed Young towards the bedroom. He was aware of himself, with every step, walking along the cracks of a multitude of different universes: the dead and the living, the sane and the mad, the Ancient and the human, and other fractures that he had not yet begun to understand. It was disorientating, like trying to keep one’s balance on a knife’s edge. He was relieved when, later, after the little rituals of nighttime normativity— the teeth-brushing, the pill-taking, the turning-out of the lights, and the climbing into bed— he could move close to Young and feel not so near to those perilous borders.

Young reached out and draped a muffling arm over his shoulders. “Go to sleep, Nick,” he said.

* * *

He slept.

In his dreams, he watched a stick-thin ballerina doing pirouettes on the eroding sand. Waves came and ate away the ground beneath her feet in layers. Two moons hung in the sky. She was dancing to the first _Gnossienne_ , of course she was, because what was this place if not the Gnossian shore? The site of labyrinths, but also knowledge. Undeciphered letters carved on tablets. Code within the circuitry of the carved stargate. Knossos. _Gnosis._ One might say: the dead kingdom where knowledge lived. 

He was afraid for her, that spindly ballerina, but he also understood that she was himself, and he had never been afraid for himself. It was a type of emotion that he found foreign.

_“You recruit other people to do it for you,” Gloria said._

He had never asked her to do anything of the sort. Never.

_“No. You tried to prevent it, I suppose. You were always remarkably difficult to love.”_

That stung. He tried to conceal that he was wounded. But he couldn’t hide it from her. She knew him too well.

_“Oh, darling,” she said. “You’re not a trial, you’re a treasure. It’s only that you come equipped with an extraordinary number of locks, which the supplicant must devise a way to open.”_

This was not true. He opened locks. He was the subject of the sentence, not the object. There was no one in the world who could open him.

_“You said it yourself,” Gloria said. “Encyphered.”_

No.

_“Subjects and objects— it’s a bit old-fashioned, anyway, isn’t it?” She wrinkled her nose. “What’s the word— retrouvé? No, that’s not it, is it. What I mean is— who’s to say you can’t be both? After all, you’re opening yourself up, aren’t you? Cracking open, like a little egg. One of those Russian eggs, with secret treasures inside them.”_

“What if I don’t want to crack open?” he whispered. He was watching the ballerina dancing. The music was no longer Satie’s first _Gnossienne_. It had wandered into the chimes that thrummed through his whole body and were no longer alien to him.

_“Well, do you?”_

“I don’t know. I do and I don’t.”

_“You used to be so certain.”_

He backtracked, clumsily. “I am. I do; I am.”

 _“You don’t sound it._ ”

It was only that he was afraid for the dancer. “Perhaps I judged ambivalence the more fitting attitude towards auto-annihilation,” he said.

_Gloria lowered her eyes and dug a toe in the sand. The white sand full of dead things that the sea brought forth in numbers. The sea that had sea-changed them after they were dead, into polished rocks or imprints in shelves of limestone, or whatever the alien equivalent of limestone might be. Insects, maybe, trapped in amber, miniature Miróesque dancers. “Auto-annihilation? Is that what you think it is?”_

“What emerges from the egg is not the egg itself. Transformation is always a process of destruction. We delude ourselves that we don’t leave dead bodies along the way.”

_Her mouth was turned down. “That’s what living is.”_

“Yes,” Rush said. “Yes. I suppose that’s right. A very long, protracted self-extinction.”

 _She shook her head and didn’t speak for a moment. He could tell she was upset. He was accustomed to her slightest microexpressions, the way the faint wrinkles at her eyes tightened, the instinctive pursing of her lips, before she attempted to smooth it all into neutral perfection._ The older you get, _he’d once told her, teasing,_ the more your face betrays you. One day you’ll find it impossible to lie to me. _He had imagined that day, far in the future. He was unaccustomed to imagining a future for himself. It had seemed tentative but almost, almost feasible. That fragile future. Gloria and him._

“At any rate,” he said into the silence, “I don’t suppose it matters. I don’t suppose I have a choice. Do I?”

_“You do and you don’t.”_

“I suppose I deserve that.” He felt himself smile, faint and crooked. “What happens when I open it? When I open… ?”

_Gloria regarded him. Her eyes were very calm and moonlike. She was Gloria and not-Gloria. “Well,” she said. “I suppose we’ll see.”_

The music grew louder. The hammered music. Or malleted, maybe. The dancer pirouetted frenetically on the receding sand. She was accompanied in Miró’s painting by a figureless spiral, the ghost of her motion or a partner who could not be seen, who was moving so fast that he was no longer visible as a person. He had transcended a certain narrow spectrum and Miró was forced to represent him by other means.

Rush had come to Colorado imprinted with the idea that it might be better to transcend a certain narrow spectrum. He still believed this. Didn’t he?

He wanted to be in tune.

And he was being tuned.

Of course it was difficult. Painful. Tuning had to be.

His skin stretched strangely over his body.

His brain stretched strangely within his brain.

If he could just _play_ the _music_ then it would resonate with him, and then every piece of him would be proportional and correct. He would no longer look to the sky in search of the moon that had once been part of his body, before the killing asteroid came. He would no longer feel the gravitational pull of its absence. He would no longer know the paths of meteors scattered by impact as particles of himself that he could not get back. So many impacts over the course of his miniscule existence. But all would be reunited. All would be made whole. He knew it would.

And then—

he would emerge from the labyrinth—  
Then? Would there be a then?  
He thought there would not be a then  
and he would have what he wanted—  
what he had gone in to get—  
There would not be a him.

He closed his eyes, struck by a sudden bout of vertigo triggered by watching the dancer spin.

When he opened them, he was standing in Young’s kitchen and he did not know how he had got there.

This troubled him, but only a little. It was difficult to be troubled by so small a strangeness as abruptly arriving in a kitchen when a fever of noise was pulsing through him, metallophones and chimes and a form of bell that was neither, creating a precise and elegant audial storm that suggested at once a remote and intellectual sophistication and something more primal, an invocation of gods, though perhaps he was overlaying upon it his own preconceptions, but it made him shiver, standing barefoot in Young’s kitchen at some early hour of the morning, with moonlight spilling through the uncovered windows like white fog.

semiquaver 1/16semiquaver 1/16 semiquaver1/16  
rest1/16 1/16rest 1/16 1/16rest 1/16 1/16REPEAT  
  
Cx5 xC#5 xEflat5 xxG5  
crotchet crotchetcrotchetcrotchet

He was in the kitchen because—

xxAflat5 xxG5 xEflat5xC#5  
crotchet crotchet crotchet crotchet

He had to _play the music._

And the piano had been out of tune.

He would have to build instruments tuned to his specifications.

It wanted to be spoken.

_“It wants to be spoken,” Gloria whispered at the back of his brain._

This did not quite make sense. How could something that _was not yet_ or _was not anymore_ want anything? Yet he was certain of the desire that resounded in each quaver. He had a responsibility, he thought. That was what he had not considered. What did he owe the inanimate diaspora of the race that he was not but that reached out across time and the stars towards him, extending to him the offer of identification, at a cost he did not yet understand? It was in his blood. He owed the originators of that music something.

_“Speak. Speak it. Speak for it.”_

Slowly, shivering a little in the pre-dawn chill, Rush opened the kitchen cabinets and began to sort through them.                                                      

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rush quotes Dryden's translation of the _Aeneid_ and Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus."


	29. Chapter 29

_Young wakes up in a prison cell. From what he can see of it, it has that good old Goa’uld aesthetic, sort of Vatican-meets-space-age-Byzantine-Emperor, lots of ornaments and black and gold. The fact that the prison cell’s so elaborate makes him think that maybe its original intended use wasn’t “prison cell.” The Lucian Alliance have always been sort of squatters, the looters who broke into the palaces once the real fighting of the revolution was done. The Russian revolution, is what Young’s thinking about— men with muddy boots marching through the halls of palaces, holding military tribunals and shabby meetings in rooms with mirrored walls._

_Young doesn’t know if that really happened, actually. He thinks maybe he saw it in a movie, or else someone told him the story and it stuck. He’s never bothered to look it up, because it felt true. He’s heard stories from friends about the looting of Iraq. Mostly it was Iraqis who did the looting, but he knows people who brought home broken pieces of clay tablets, or pieces of jewelry, or painted horses and bulls that looked like children’s toys. You could buy them on the street in Baghdad. Nothing had any real value. War scrambles everything, confuses your natural orientations, till the only valuable thing is surviving the war._

_That was how the Lucian Alliance started out. Starving kids in the house of their masters. But somehow they never outgrew that stage._

_So that’s why Young is here, in this purposeless-room-turned-prison-cell, trying to see by the artificial light that cuts its way through the door’s observation window. The rest of the room is dark, but he can sense something moving in it. He knows that he’s not alone._

_Any minute now, David’s going to drag himself haltingly into that line of light. “Young,” he’ll say, his voice hoarse, and Young’s eyes will be drawn to the blood both crusted and still running on his half-exposed chest._

_But Young waits and David doesn’t come. There’s only a scraping noise from the other side of the cell— the sound, maybe, of something crawling in the dark._

_“David?” Young says, his voice low and rusty. His head aches. He’s okay right now, compared to what’s going to come next, but he doesn’t know that yet and so he thinks he hurts._

_No answer._

_Young is the one who crawls across the sliver of light that perforates the floor. He does so slowly and dizzily, fighting back a mounting sense of dread. Something that’s not David is in the cell with him, something that scrapes and crawls and rustles, something that hides and doesn’t speak. It’s the thing he felt behind him, right at his shoulder, when he was walking in the pastures at night as a kid. It’s what lived under his bed and breathed against the tips of his fingers if he let his hand dangle over the edge. It’s_ that thing _, unseen, deformed, and dangerous._

_He gropes across the floor, needing to know its location even though he’s repulsed by the thought of touching it._

_It will eat him up, he thinks. It will tear him to pieces._

_It will have too many teeth in its face. It will have too many faces._

_Reaching in the darkness, he touches its bare foot first. He gets a good grip around the ankle. It doesn’t seem to be fighting him. It’s wearing BDUs; he recognizes the fabric. He drags it closer to him by the leg._

_He feels his way up the thing’s body, and maybe, maybe, he already knows; maybe he has the lurking suspicion; why else would he be so afraid, why would he feel so conflicted, if some seed of poison within hadn’t murmured the answer, sprouting warnings like little toxic leaves? Unless it was just that like knows like; same calls to itself; and he doesn’t have to search for the strip of nametape on the jacket; he just has to grope for the grown-too-long curls that frame the broad and over-earnest face._

_It smiles, and he feels the muscles move under his fingers. Sickened, he recoils and shoves it away, only to feel it lurch back towards him— this thing that can’t be him, this dumb monster trapped in a prison on a planet thousands of light years from Earth that_ can’t _be him; it_ cannot be _, he_ won’t let it _, but it’s coming for him, he can hear it in the darkness and it will_ eat him up _, and there is no escape—_

Young woke in a cold sweat, sucking air into his lungs as though he’d been drowning.

He wasn’t in the cell. He hadn’t been in the cell for a long time. He was back on Earth.

He was on Earth, and he could tell because of the solid mass of pain sitting under the skin of his back and hip. It had never reassured him before, but it did now. It was a reminder that time had passed, that he had gotten free.

He kicked the comforter off his body and pressed his face into the pillow, trying to banish the nightmare while he let the sweat on his body dry. Birds were chirping outside the window; the trees were swaying, casting stripes of shadow across his bedroom’s bare walls and floor. Uneasiness wouldn’t let go of its hold on him.

It was at this point that he realized that Rush had been in the bed with him, and wasn’t anymore.

Alarmed, he sat up too fast and had to double over as muscles in his back cramped. He waited out the spasm, short-breathed, and groped his way to the nightstand to shake a Percocet out of the bottle and swallow it.

Where was Rush?

“Rush?” he called. His voice was hoarse.

No one answered.

He stood unsteadily and listed from bed to dresser to wall in order to cross the room. He couldn’t hear anything from the rest of the apartment— not the noise of typing, or pots and pans being slammed around in the kitchen, or even humming, which might have indicated that Rush was still losing it, but would also have indicated that he was at least present.

The security team would have stopped him from leaving the building. Wouldn’t they?

Feeling spooked, Young worked his way down the hallway, wishing that he’d brought his crutches to bed. It seemed to take him forever to cross a distance that was maybe ten feet.

“Rush?” he called again.

No Rush.

From somewhere in the apartment, he heard a sound he couldn’t identify— faint, hollow, wavering, and bell-like. It reminded him of a music box or a toy piano, something small and delicate and creaky and too high-pitched, just a little bit out-of-tune in a way he didn’t like.

He followed that sound. As he emerged from the hallway, he blinked, and wondered for a moment if he was still asleep. He looked back uncertainly towards his bed. He hadn’t _hurt_ when he was dreaming, but he hurt now. In terms of situating himself in the real world, it seemed like a reasonable metric to use. Even with that reassurance, though, he felt— dislocated. Literally. Like a shoulder torn out of its socket.

From the very edge of the hallway to the balcony doors, as far as he was able to see, the floor of the apartment was covered in tiny cups filled with water— shot glasses, he realized, the shot glasses he’d collected from all the places he’d ever vacationed, California and the Crystal Coast and the Florida Keys; and not just shot glasses, but brandy snifters and tumblers, margarita glasses and champagne flutes, types of wine glasses he hadn’t even known he owned, some with round bells and some stemless, each one balanced carefully on the floorboards in some kind of cryptic relationship to the others, and each one with a very small amount of water in it. The light through the windows struck the surface of all the spoonful-amounts of water and threw little circles of light everywhere Young looked, like ghostly coins, or constellations whose waterlogged stars were all going nova. He held his hand up and caught one of the pale, wavering circles, startled for some reason that it didn’t hurt.

The cabinets in the kitchen had been flung open, and Rush had clearly rifled through them— all his complicated gadgets, some of which had been disassembled, were spilling out onto the floor. Drawers were hanging off their hinges. Some of them were still holding their contents, but most had had been emptied: forks, knives, spatulas, strainers added to the general junk heap in no particular kind of order, very much as though an earthquake had struck. That was what happened in earthquakes, wasn’t it? Dishes coming off their shelves, and drawers torn open. The basic level of structure you’d worked hard to maintain was betrayed, suddenly, by the ground that wouldn’t stay solid underneath it. Young had never been in an earthquake, so he didn’t know what it felt like. But he imagined it wasn’t so different from this.

On the other side of the kitchen island, the peculiar landscape continued: the rows and rows of glasses supplemented, this time, by the two Pyrex measuring cups, a set of casserole dishes, a vase shaped like a budding flower, and a crystal punch bowl, all of which had also been filled with water and abandoned. The whole apartment seemed have turned, overnight, into a small city built to some purpose Young couldn’t imagine, one to which he didn’t have a map. He was afraid of knocking over any of the glasses, aware of himself as a clumsy giant intruding on a very careful and beautiful architecture that wasn’t his. What would happen if he broke something? If he toppled one of the little towers? He didn’t know, and it seemed possible that in doing so he’d upset some important cosmic balance. He had a kind of terror of that thought.

When he reached the far side of the kitchen island, he stopped to take some kind of stock of the situation— carefully resting his hand between a Mason jar and a cactus-shaped bottle of tequila whose contents had been emptied out. He looked around. The room was full of refracted light; it was like an infestation of brightness. Those tiny shivering stains of sun skittered across every wall.

His gaze fixed on the wall nearest to him, where, beneath the watery sunlight, he could see that someone had drawn a perfect freehand circle with a radius of about a foot. It looked— and, when he approached it, smelled— like it had been done in black Sharpie. It was notched all over and labeled with incomprehensible symbols: what had to be Ancient writing of some kind, and little squiggles and c’s and u’s and o’s.

He touched one of the squiggles with a finger, mechanically contemplating the security deposit that, in all likelihood, he wasn’t going to get back. Really, he should’ve just said goodbye to it the first time Jackson carted Rush over. But Young hadn’t known that yet.

He hadn’t known that, and so he’d let Jackson bring this lunatic into his apartment. And now his living room had been colonized by cups of water, and his walls were covered in extraterrestrial math, and he was so fucking worried about Rush, and angry, too, because he’d _kissed_ Rush, and it had felt like a promise, like he was giving up a little piece of himself as a pledge, and if he was honest it’d felt like he was actually carving something out of his body. It was that physical, that real, the pledge. But Rush couldn’t be held down by things like pledges, apparently. He had to push on forwards in the derby he was running, the race to fuck himself up.

“Rush?” Young said again.

He pushed off the wall and limped over to the couch, noting mechanically as he did so that the far wall also bore a Rushian circle notated in Ancient.

Everything that had been on the coffee table when they’d gone to bed the previous night— a couple of magazines, _Dispatches_ , the TV remote, and some stray pieces of mail— had been unceremoniously shoved off to make way for two rows of drinking glasses arranged by height from tallest to shortest, and dripping in a way that even Young knew was sure to leave a mark on the wood.

Rush— clad only in his boxers and, for some reason, Young’s black BDU jacket— was crouched in front of the line of glasses, holding a bowl full of water and wearing an intensely concentrated look. His hands were wet; the cuffs of the jacket were soaked, which he didn’t seem to notice. As Young watched, he dipped his hand in the bowl of water and ran a finger around the edge of one of the glasses, producing a low, quiet, bell-like sound. Rush made a noise of dissatisfaction and scooped a handful of water out of the bowl, flinging it more-or-less at the glass, then repeated the motion. The same sound, but maybe a little bit lower. Rush hummed the same pitch. He was testing, probably, to see if the two matched, but it sounded almost like he was communicating with it, which should have been a silly idea but somehow, in the moment, wasn’t. It made the hair on the back of Young’s neck stand up.

“Rush,” Young said, leaning forwards and waving to get Rush’s attention.

Rush recoiled like a startled fox, falling back and barely catching himself on his hands. He stared at Young, wild-eyed and half-soaked with water, his glasses more than usually crooked and his hair a mess. “What the _fuck_?” he demanded, his voice strangled.

The question was so outrageous in their current circumstances, so unearned and inappropriate, that for a second Young didn’t know how to respond. He was angry, then amused, then finally uneasy. “What the fuck?” he repeated. “I don’t know, Rush; you tell _me_ what the fuck!”

Rush frowned and looked uncertainly around the room, then down at himself. “I… borrowed your shirt,” he said slowly. “You’re upset.”

Young shut his eyes for a second. “ _Yes_ , I’m upset. Not about the fucking shirt. What the _hell_ is going on?”

“You didn’t want me to retune the piano,” Rush said defensively. His eyes drifted back to the row of glasses. A beat passed. “I suspect your judgment was correct. I wouldn’t have got the pitches right.”

Young stared at him. He could tell that Rush wasn’t just being an asshole, was the worrying thing. Rush was genuinely just totally clueless as to what Young might find even remotely strange about the fact that Rush had wrecked his kitchen and covered his apartment in dishes full of water. “Nick,” he said very slowly— and he had said that last night, hadn’t he, without really meaning to, he’d called Rush _Nick_ , and he’d known when he said it that he meant something different than Jackson or Telford, that he was using a different cadence, creating a private language, calling something into being with that word— “can you tell me what’s going on in your head right now? What you’re hearing?”

But he’d lost Rush’s attention by the end of that second question. Rush had tilted his head in the opposite direction and straightened, turning back towards the table.

“ _Nick,_ ” Young said loudly.

Rush didn’t seem to hear him. He was adding a minute amount of water to one of the glasses, humming faintly under his breath.

Young shut his eyes again and scrubbed his hands against them. He felt exhausted, or maybe just helpless. He thought he’d always experienced the two sensations as the same thing. When he was trapped, when he most needed an extra surge of energy, he felt unutterably weary instead.

Something was wrong with Rush. He needed help. And Young didn’t know who he could trust to help him.

Jackson was his first thought, once again. But Jackson wasn’t a doctor, or not that kind of doctor. And Young was pretty sure that he needed that kind of doctor, which probably meant Lam— he didn’t know many other people in medical. But he knew that if he brought Lam into the situation, that meant the whole committee, because she might lie to the general or to her dad, but there were pretty few people in the world who would bear up under the pressure of lying to their-dad-the-general, especially when the fate of the Earth was potentially on the line. Maybe this was nothing, a false alarm, and Rush just had a fever or something; maybe he’d be back to normal, or as normal as he got, in a few days.

But Young didn’t think it was nothing. And if it wasn’t nothing, and Landry and the IOA got involved—

“Fuck,” Young said softly.

Rush, of course, didn’t notice. He was playing with his glasses of water, producing a string of weird wavering noises that didn’t have a normal pitch. The sun through the water sent flickers of light up and down his body, making him look even more unearthly than he would’ve already looked. Even more unearthly than he’d looked on that goddamn double-mooned planet when—

A thought occurred to Young.

He grabbed his crutches from the side of the couch, where he’d left them, and made his way back to the bedroom to get his phone. It took a second to dial Stargate Command, and luck was with him: Harriman answered. “Hey, Walter,” Young said. “It’s Young. I’m trying to track down Dr. Alaniz, or at least see if she’s currently on Earth.”

* * *

Half an hour later, Alaniz met him in the Cheyenne Mountain infirmary, sour-faced and carrying a large coffee cup. Little tendrils of her dark hair looked electrified where they were trying to frizz out of their constraining bun. “It’s 8 AM, and I’m still on Atlantean time,” she said. “Your ‘friend’ better be bleeding internally.”

“It’s not that kind of an emergency,” Young told her.

“Thought we weren’t calling it an emergency,” she said.

Young had said that on the phone: _Listen, I’ve got a… let’s not call it an emergency. It needs to stay kind of hushed up._ She’d sounded amused: _I thought they warned you guys to use protection._ Young had said, _It’s not me. It’s the guy from the planet. The Odyssey mission._ And: _The important one,_ Alaniz had said.

The important one. Who had let Young steer him out of the apartment, showing only a muddy-filtered awareness of what was happening, and let Young load him into the truck, then spent the short ride breathing clouds against the window and then writing Ancient letters with his fingertip. He’d seemed confused when they arrived at the Mountain; _You said they hadn’t got a piano_ , he’d said, frowning, his voice accusatory, like he thought Young had been trying to hide secret pianos from him.

Now he was standing in the infirmary, looking lost, his mouth moving slightly— as though he were holding a conversation under his breath. He was still wearing Young’s BDU jacket, which was too big for his shoulders, although at least Young had gotten him to put on shoes and pants.

Alaniz studied him, frowning. “Dr. Rush,” she said.

Rush didn’t seem to register her presence.

“Dr. Rush, do you remember me?”

“I don’t think he can hear us,” Young said.

“What do you mean, he can’t hear us?”

“I think he might be listening to something else. Like— something he can hear that we can’t. Look—” Young rubbed at his brow. “I know how it sounds. I just—He said he was working on a musical cipher. He keeps _humming_ , and he turned half my apartment into a— I don’t know, a wineglass orchestra or something.”

Alaniz shifted slightly to Rush’s left, out of his line of sight, and snapped her fingers next to his ear. Nothing. “Any other behavioral changes?” she asked Young.

“Ever since he got back from that planet…” Young shook his head. “I mean, I guess it’s hard to tell with him, since he’s pretty out there all the time, but he’s been getting more out there. Weirder. _Different_ weird.”

Alaniz stepped in front of Rush and put her hand on his shoulder. “Dr. Rush,” she said again.

His eyes seemed to slowly focus on her. “Yes,” he said, looking perplexed. “Yes, that’s me.”

“Can you sit down on this gurney for me? I need to take your vital signs.”

The good thing about whatever was going on with Rush, Young thought, was that it made him a lot more likely to follow orders. He sat on the gurney without arguing with Alaniz about it and let her stick a thermometer under his tongue. She frowned at the result and positioned his arm so she could strap a blood pressure cuff on him, then put her fingers against the inside of his wrist. She was looking at the readouts on the machine, which Young couldn’t see, and something about what she saw made her frown again.

“What’s wrong?” Young said.

Alaniz didn’t answer him at first. She was watching Rush’s face, probably seeing what Young could see: the way that Rush’s expression went dreamy and slack, his eyes wandering to fix on something that wasn’t actually in the room.

Alaniz reached out and gently turned his head to face her. “Dr. Rush,” she said. “Can you tell me what you’re seeing and hearing right now?”

He flinched away from her touch and hugged his arms across his chest: a defensive gesture. “No. Why?”

“Colonel Young and I are having a hard time understanding the way you’re acting. But I’m thinking that if we had a little more information, it might make sense.”

“Unlikely.” Rush’s gaze flicked to Young. He jerked his head in Young’s direction, just for good measure. “ _He_ thinks I’m mad already.”

“No, I don’t,” Young said, resigned.

Rush raked his hair back, but without much energy in the gesture. “He’s just waiting—“ he said, and then seemed to briefly lose track of whatever bizarre list of charges he’d been planning to level against Young. “He’s waiting to file a report on me with his cabal of cornfed little clean-handed fucking—“ Again, his attention drifted for a second, then was back. “Fucking— Stasi aficionados, the ones who sequenced my fucking genome without asking and want to lock me up.”

Young sighed and shoved both hands through his unruly curls, trying to put the kibosh on a growing headache. “I’m not filing secret reports on him,” he told Alaniz. “I’m trying to _stop_ him from getting locked up, as I’ve repeatedly tried to explain to him— a mission that, by the way, he is _not at all_ helping with.” The last part was louder and delivered in Rush’s direction.

Alaniz looked at him with an unreadable expression. She adjusted her delicate metal-rimmed glasses. “Is this why you asked me not to call Dr. Lam? You know I might have to.”

“Yeah,” Young said. He let out a breath. “I know. I’m just trying to—“ He made a helpless gesture, then realize that the gesture was constrained by the fact that he was still standing and leaning on the end of a gurney. He considered sitting and dismissed the idea, because he didn’t know where to sit. He didn’t know the situation. Fundamentally, on every fucking level, he felt like he didn’t know what the fuck to do. “—Help him. I’m trying to help him, so I’m asking _you_ to help him. Please. Whatever you have to do to make that happen.”

For a moment, Alaniz continued to watch him in silence. Young had the same sense he’d had before, on the _Odyssey_ — that she was taking some private measure, sticking that thermometer of hers right straight into the center of him. He met her gaze and hoped like hell he could trust her.

She pursed her lips and looked away, running a hand over her pulled-taut hair as though trying to make the rebellious little strands go flat. “Okay,” she said at last. “Here’s what I want to do. His heart rate’s high and his temperature’s low, so I’m gonna get him hooked up to a heart monitor, and then I want to do an EEG, and _you_ , mister—“ she flicked Rush on the shoulder— “are going to dish on just what the fuck it is you’re hearing. Or seeing. Or both. I need to know what’s going on in that head. Sound good?”

Rush looked at her with a confounded expression. Probably no one had ever dared to flick him on the shoulder before; under normal circumstances, he’d have tried to bite her finger off, no doubt. So whatever was happening to him, it definitely made him nicer. The problem was that Young found he hated it. Even when they’d went to see the buffalo, when Rush had been at what Young felt somehow was his _closest_ , like the two of them were physical objects, planets in space, and Rush put out some kind of field that kept people away from him, like that was what the two of them were, how they worked, and Rush had let Young move silently so close that Young could feel the heat and blue glow of his atmosphere— even then, Rush had been savage in the particular chop-and-parry way that Young had learned to expect from him. This vague Rush seemed to have almost none of Rush left in him, like Rush had taken all the himself out of himself and put it in a box.

The thought made Young go back to feeling exhausted. “Yeah,” he said to Alaniz, looking away so she wouldn’t see it in his face. “Sure. Sounds good.”

* * *

Rush in a hospital gown was worse, even though Young had seen him like that before— and not just in a hospital gown this time, but hooked up to machines, an IV in his arm, electrodes threaded through his hair to reach his scalp, which made Young’s stomach twist as he remembered the diagrams in the Committee #6 reports of proposed tests and experiments that Anubis had done… The figure in these diagrams was faceless; it wasn’t even a real figure in those diagrams. Just an outline of a person, a generic suggestion of one.

“It’s gonna be okay,” Young said. He’d sat down, finally, at Rush’s bedside, the stupidest and most useless place for him to be.

Rush gave him a perfunctory frown. “Of course it’s going to be okay. Why would it not be okay?”

“This can’t be right,” Alaniz said from somewhere to Young’s left.

He glanced over at her. She was standing over the EEG machine, studying its trailing paper. “What can’t be right?”

She ignored him and ditched the machine for Rush, rummaging around in the briar-patch of wires that now seemed to sprout from his head. Her expression grew more frozen as her small hands tracked the hidden electrodes, checking every place where they were connected to Rush. “Fuck,” she said under her breath.

“What’s going on?” Young demanded. His voice dipped a little, dread making it unsteady.

“Give me a second,” Alaniz said. She went back to the machine. Its needle was sketching out peaks and valleys: a pencil landscape, but hair-thin, and meaningless to anyone who didn’t know what the terrain was supposed to look like. Young could tell by Alaniz’s expression that the terrain wasn’t supposed to look like this.

After a few seconds, she hit a button on the machine and strode quickly towards a wall-mounted telephone. She dialed a Cheyenne Mountain extension. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s Jaime Alaniz. I need you in the main infirmary for a consult, stat.” A pause. “No, I’ll explain when you— Just get the fuck down here, all right?”

The rubber soles of her regulation boots made urgent sounds against the floor as she moved back to Rush’s gurney and waved a hand at him to get his attention. “Rush,” she said sharply. “ _Rush._ ”

Rush blinked at her a little irritably. “Yes? What?”

“I need you to tell me what you’re hearing and seeing. Anything that seems out of the ordinary, anything that might be symptomatic. Right now, your brain is showing abnormal neuronal activity— activity at levels that should be impossible for a human being to sustain. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Mm.” Rush didn’t seem interested. He was tapping out something against the infirmary blanket with the fingers of his left hand.

“Listen to me,” Alaniz said. There was an intensity to her that suggested a gestating crisis. “For all intents and purposes, you are having a seizure. And I don’t know how long you’ve been having it. We need to figure that out, okay?”

“A _seizure?_ ” Young said sharply. “What the fuck?”

“That’s not—“ Rush said distractedly. “That’s not what it feels like.”

“What does it feel like?” Young reached out and grabbed Rush’s hand to still it. “What are you _hearing?_ ”

Rush shook his head as though trying to clear away some fog of confusion. “You know,” he said absently, “I’ve started to wonder if I ever actually left the courtyard. It’s a conundrum. Famously, the philosopher Zhuang Zhu considered whether he could say with certainty that, having awakened from a dream in which he was a butterfly, he was in fact a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who was now dreaming that it was a man.” Rush stared down at his hand in Young’s. “I _thought_ I was awake. Sheppard pulled me out of the water. Didn’t he? But then how can I be here _and_ there? At the same time? It was easier in the beginning. But now it’s very difficult. I know, you see, that Gloria’s dead. But how can she be dead, when she’s there and she’s still speaking? She isn’t a memory. She hears the music too; she was the one who gave me the idea at first of the ghost note— that they might use a 22-tone system, but designate a note that exists but is never played. It’s more complicated than that— it moves, it shifts, it alters; it’s in their _scales_ , the ghost note, and possibly— possibly in their ciphers.”

He lapsed into silence, indicating that he was under the impression he’d answered the question, or maybe just that he’d lost interest in the real world again. Neither one seemed like a comforting option.

Alaniz looked at Young like she was expecting him to translate. He shrugged helplessly.

“You don’t think this is real?” he asked Rush..

Rush let his head tip back against the gurney and didn’t answer. He was fidgeting, not quite fighting Young’s grip, but politely requesting release from it.

“This is real,” Young said, tightening his grasp instead.“You and Sheppard _did_ come back.”

Beside him, Alaniz said, under her breath, “Sheppard. So we’re back to the trigger being the mission.”

“He was unconscious for hours afterward,” Young said. “No one ever figured out why. And— he heard music then, too.”

“The same type of hallucination?”

“I think so.”

“And that was the first time?”

“Yeah,” Young said. “— No. I mean— yes, I think so. A month and change back, when the Lucian Alliance attacked my apartment building, he heard some kind of music and passed out, but I don’t think it was exactly the same.”

“—No,” Rush agreed. He seemed restless; he shook his head. “I couldn’t _hear_ it properly.”

“And you hear it better now,” Alaniz said.

“Yes,” Rush said. “Better. I hear it better. I _need_ to hear it. It’s—“ He searched for the words, and then sighed, as though he’d given up on finding them. “I need to hear it,” he said again. He jerked his hand harder, trying to get free of Young. “I should be listening. Let go of me.”

Young didn’t want to let go, although he didn’t want to hurt Rush either. He didn’t want to be just one more thing, like the heart monitor and the IV and the electrodes, that was keeping him restrained. He felt caught in some kind of impasse with no solution. His instinctive response was to push Rush’s hand flat against the bed: a clumsy half-gentle and half-violent gesture that achieved none of the tangled, unnameable things he _did_ want. “You said I help,” he said, as some kind of justification. “You said I make it quieter.”

Rush tried to clench his hand into a fist, and then heaved a sigh and subsided. He gave Young a dissatisfied look. “You do not _help_. You interfere. Always interfering.”

Young managed a painful smile. “Yup. Sounds like me.”

“I _need_ to hear it. I need to _listen_.”

“I know,” Young said. “I know you do. But maybe you could take a little break?”

Rush eyed him suspiciously. “For how long?”

“I don’t know. Just for now.”

Alaniz had withdrawn to the EEG machine and was consulting its readouts. When she returned to Rush’s gurney, she bent close to Young. “I’ve got a neuro consult on the way,” she whispered. “Keep talking to him. It does seem like it cools his EEG down a little. It’s probably self-regulation; he normalizes when he focuses on something real.”

“No,” Rush said loudly, without looking at her. “ _He_ regulates me. Destructive interference. He has the right pitch.”

Young shook his head and glanced at Alaniz. “Just— don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll talk to him. But listen, if your neuro guy doesn’t turn up anything…” He hesitated. “Go ahead and call Lam if you have to.”

She gave him a long look. “You’re worried,” she said.

Young shrugged tightly. He didn’t know how he was feeling. He didn’t think _worried_ was the right word to describe it. More like levels upon levels of trapped. “—If you have to,” he said again. “Only if you have to.”

When he turned back to Rush, Rush was watching him with a hazy sort of knowing expression.

“Difficult,” Rush said. “Isn’t it. When you can’t trust anyone.”

“You _can_ trust someone,” Young said. He felt his throat close without warning. He had to clear it. “You can trust me.”

“To do what?”

Young said, “To help you.”

Rush twisted his head unhappily away. The movement made all the wires connected to him shiver. He yanked his hand hard against Young’s grip. “ _Not_ to help me.”

“Not to help you give yourself a fucking _seizure_ ,” Young said in frustration, feeling helpless. “Jesus Christ!”

“I didn’t tell you because I knew, I knew, I knew that you would—“

“What? _Worry_ about you? Care what happens to you?” Young had to turn away and take a breath. He was angry without really knowing why, miserable and hot-eyed. If he’d been home, he thought, he’d have broken something. Well. It would’ve been easy enough for him to break things if he had been home. He imagined bringing his boot down on Rush’s goddamn wineglasses, upsetting their cryptic patterns, crushing them and spraying water across the floor.

“I knew you wouldn’t let me,” Rush whispered. He had his eyes halfway closed. “You wouldn’t _let_ me, and you don’t get to _let_ me, you don’t _get_ to, I won’t—“ He flinched and paused for a long moment. “It’s got nothing to do with that,” he said, as though Young had spoken. He sounded wretched. “It _is_ my choice. I’m a person. I still am.” Another pause, as though he were listening to someone. “Because that’s what a person _is._ ”

“Nick,” Young said cautiously, “who are you talking to?”

“You should know that,” Rush said. “You of all people should know that.”

Young sighed. “What does that mean?”

Rush looked at him without really seeing him, wide-eyed and obscurely tormented. Sweat had stuck a few stray strands of hair to his clammy forehead. Young wanted to reach out and brush them away, but didn’t, not sure if Rush would welcome the gesture. The inaction seemed like action, another kind of equally culpable action, and that made him angrier, more helpless. There was nothing he could do or not do that was correct. He thought this was probably Rush’s fault. Rush was largely responsible for situations that trended towards collapse, as though he couldn’t see a rulebook without picking up and ripping out handfuls of pages, heedless and scornful of the idea that someone might depend on it— that they might make mistakes without it, not know how to act.

Rush seemed to sense something of Young’s frustration. Or maybe he was still fixated on how much he didn’t trust Young. “Nothing,” he said. “It means nothing. I was talking to— myself. That’s all. I’m perfectly capable. I’m not mad. I’m not _mad_.”

And Young had had that thought, of course; had read the committee reports and thought it, while Rush slept against his shoulder. He’d thought it, and known it, and not devised a solution to the problem. It had seemed like something he didn’t get to decide, one more symptom of the general disintegration of everything around him. But now— now he had to decide, and neither of the two options provided seem likely to lift the puncture-wound sense of misery that seemed to be draining something vital from him through a hole in his side.

He shifted in his chair deliberately, and welcomed the pain that was the predictable consequence of the action. He leaned into it. He deserved it, he thought. “I know you’re not,” he said to Rush. “I don’t think that. I’m just trying to help you.”

“Help me,” Rush said, without any energy in his voice. He closed his eyes and shook his head tiredly. After a moment, he turned away from Young, trying once more, without much real success, to work his hand out of Young’s grasp.

* * *

By lunchtime, Rush had been seen by a red-headed neurologist, a Japanese neuroscientist, and an epileptologist who’d apparently been flown in from Denver and read into the program just to consult on his case. He’d had an fMRI, PET and CT scans, and a full panel of bloodwork. Keller had Skyped in from Atlantis to talk through the results with Alaniz, because Lam had turned out to be out-of-state at a conference, and was still on her way. Various meetings had been scheduled, both medical and strategic. Young probably should’ve been spearheading them, but he pretty much hadn’t moved from Rush’s bedside. Not that his presence was doing much good— for all that Rush talked about his “pitch” interfering, he didn’t seem to be able to stop Rush from slipping further and further into a kind of catatonia that he had to be prodded to give up.

Watching Rush listlessly poke at a plastic dish of blue Jell-O on his lunch tray without actually eating any of it, Young wished he’d had the foresight to bring a book with him. He could’ve read to Rush; that had helped before. Rush had said his voice helped. But he wasn’t good with conversation; he never had been. Normally Rush did most of the talking.

“Come on, hotshot,” he said, trying. “Tell me about Scotland or something. I’ve never been there.”

“Scotland,” Rush echoed, like he was trying to remember something from a dream.

“Yeah. Where you’re from.”

“—I don’t like to think about it,” Rush said after a pause, in the same distant voice.

“No?”

“No.”

“But you have a picture of it on your phone. I saw it.”

“It’s to remind me.”

Young frowned. “To remind you of what?”

“That I don’t like to think about it.” Rush shifted restlessly and raised a hand to worry at an electrode. “Why’ve I got wires? Is this necessary? I’m not a fucking lab rat.”

At that, Young had to look away. “Yeah; sorry,” he said, determinedly not thinking about diagrams. “You need them. Till we can figure out what’s wrong.”

“Wrong,” Rush murmured, sounding dissatisfied. He was still picking at the electrode. “What if nothing is wrong?”

“Something is definitely wrong,” Young said, feeling exhausted. “You’re just going to have to trust me on this.”

“Young.”

Young turned to see a weary-looking Lam. She looked like she’d arrived at Cheyenne Mountain by way of a wind tunnel, and was being escorted by Jackson, who met Young’s startled gaze with an inscrutable look. _Escorted_ was the right word, Young thought; Jackson didn’t know who to trust, either.

“Hey,” Young said, and was surprised at how hoarse his voice sounded.

“They sent a helicopter for me. In California,” Lam said. She touched her wild hair self-consciously. “I came as soon as we landed. Has anyone talked to Keller?”

“Yeah,” Young said. “Yeah, I think they’ve kind of talked to everyone.”

Lam’s gaze flickered to Rush. “How is he?”

“Oh—“ Young ran a defeated hand over his face. “You know. Really fucking out of it? Not getting better? Almost definitely getting worse? Maybe exactly where certain people would like him, considering all he fucking _talks_ about if you don’t keep him focused for ten seconds is solving his fucking _cipher set?_ ”

He hadn’t realized he was so angry. But he was. He was angry. His whole body was suddenly edgy with anger, his torso tight, his fists wanting to work. He could feel it even in his damaged nerves and muscles, which were misfiring signals closer to spikes of heat and cold than pain. 

Lam looked at him with a closed expression. “I don’t think this is the appropriate place for that conversation.”

“I want you to work with Alaniz,” Young said. “I want her given Icarus clearance.”

Lam pressed her lips together. “And why is that?”

“Because I trust her.”

“You can trust _me_.”

“Can I?” He thought: _To do what?_

“I’m the chief medical officer of this organization,” Lam said sharply. “A position I take very seriously. If you’re questioning my allegiances, then I find that offensive. If you’re questioning—“

“I’m not questioning your allegiances,” Young said.

She continued, talking over him. “—My role in a committee that I sit on within that organization, then I would point out that _you_ now sit on that committee as well, and if the goals of that committee are personally objectionable to you, then maybe it’s time for you to reconsider your role in the Icarus Project.”

“Guys,” Jackson cut in, his voice pitched low and soothing. “Let’s try to remember that we’re on the same team.”

Lam took a deep breath and scooped her hair back from her face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It was a choppy flight.”

“I’m not questioning your allegiances,” Young said again. He wasn’t. She was a good person in a bad situation, was what he thought. “I’m just worried about Rush’s safety.”

“Yes.” Lam looked down. “Under the circumstances, I can see the argument for extending clearance to a second medical professional. If anything, today is proof we should’ve done it before. I’ll meet with her. I need to talk to her, anyway, and go over the test results before I do a gene-protein assay.”

“Thank you,” Young said.

Their eyes met. Lam smiled wanly. “I’m going to do my best, you know,” she said. “Worrying about his safety is my job.”

Young looked at her and felt ill with the lie, which she didn’t seem aware of. Maybe, in a way, it _was_ her job. Or she had found a way to believe that she could do the two things without contradiction: worrying about Rush’s safety, and her actual job.

He managed a nod, before he turned back towards Rush. “Alaniz is talking with the epileptologist,” he said. “In your office.”

He heard Lam’s shoes clicking against the floor as she left. A few moments passed in silence, and then he felt Jackson’s hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, Nick,” Jackson said to Rush, over Young’s head. “You’re looking atypically rhizomatic.”

It took Rush a long time to respond. It’d been taking longer and longer. His mind seemed to be surfacing from somewhere far underwater. Finally the corner of his mouth lifted faintly. “It’s not nice to—“ He paused, distracted, and then groped his way back to the sentence. It was painful to watch. “To make jokes that Young won’t understand.”

“Because, of course, you care so much about manners,” Jackson said, clearly working to keep his voice light. “How are you?”

Rush’s attention wandered again. “I need paper,” he said, as though this was an answer, or as if he hadn’t really been paying attention to the content of the question. “I’m… using ‘paper’ metonymically to refer to any surface on which I can make a permanent mark. Of course. And—“ He shut his eyes for a second and shook his head. “A biro. Pen. Pencil. Marker.” He shoved listlessly at his lunch tray. “Can someone for the love of Christ get rid of this rubbish?”

“He drew all over my walls last night,” Young told Jackson, trying to keep the mood light. “Like a five-year-old.” Rush hadn’t eaten more than a few bites of the food on the tray, but he moved it to the next gurney over, figuring it wasn’t worth fighting about at this point.

“I nearly had it,” Rush whispered. His hands moved restlessly in his lap. “Nearly. A twenty-two tone system. But always a note that wasn’t played. A ghost note in every scale, present but absent. It makes me— It makes me think—“ He shook his head again, as though trying to clear it. His eyes looked sleepy and vague. “The ciphers. Nine but not nine. _Not nine._ They did things in threes, but they had a twenty-two tone system.”

“He thinks the cipher is musical,” Young explained to Jackson. “The ninth one.”

“The last one,” Jackson said.

“No,” Rush said.

Jackson went still. “No?”

“Not the last one. There are ten ciphers. There _must_ be ten.”

Jackson’s gaze fixed on him, full of the intense silence that Jackson brought to bear on people. It always felt the same color as his eyes, like a high-up part of the atmosphere, too remote a place for anything human to live. “How is that possible?”

Rush seemed to have stopped following the conversation. His eyes slid closed and then flickered open. “I need paper,” he said again. “Paper.”

Young reached out and took his hand, shaking it gently. “Nick,” he said. “Stay with us, okay?”

Rush traced a shape against the hollow of Young’s palm with a single fingertip before pulling his hand back. “You used to be louder,” he said, sounding wistful.

“I’m right here,” Young said. “I’m being as loud as I can be.” Rush’s touch lingered against him like an accusation. He closed his fingers into a fist, but it refused to fade.

“Nick,” Jackson interjected, leaning forwards with a posture that spoke of urgency. “What did you mean about there being ten ciphers? Have you told anyone else this?”

Rush acted as though he hadn’t heard him. He didn’t look like he was registering much of anything at the moment; he was humming slightly under his breath, the fingers of his left hand moving against the blanket as though he were paying a piano that only he could see.

Young glanced at Jackson. “You think this is bad news.”

Jackson smiled tensely and humorlessly. “Oh,” he said. “These days it’s all bad news.

Young wanted to press him on the topic, force him to be more straightforward; he could feel a current of that anger surfacing again. But he was interrupted by Lam’s reappearance. She’d thrown a white coat over her clothing and managed to wrangle her hair up off her neck. Probably she was trying to look more professional, but instead she looked a lot younger, and exhausted.

Jackson turned to her, his whole posture a question.

“It turns out that Dr. Keller did a preliminary gene-protein assay,” Lam said. “Apparently they have a lot of Ancient genetic mishaps on Atlantis. Dr. Rush is showing elevated levels of the proteins we’ve identified as key to Ancient cognition and ascension. It’s possible that he encountered some form of epigenetic trigger during his offworld mission— I’ve asked Keller to do a similar assay on samples collected from Colonel Sheppard. But, of course, that can only confirm, not fully rule out the possibility.”

The anger was there again, under Young’s skin, like a hot prickling current, a swarm of wasps that he wanted to set free. “So what you’re saying is, this is what we want,” he said.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Lam said stiffly.

Jackson said, very carefully, “Everett. Don’t.”

Young rounded on him, as much as he could from within the confines of the chair. “That’s what she’s saying, though, isn’t it? We want this. Hell, we should just send everybody home. False alarm, no emergency, everything’s _fine_ ; Rush just skipped the first few steps of the program, is all—“

“ _Stop_ ,” Jackson said. “Stop talking. You’ll be charged with disclosing classified information.”

“To who?” Young demanded. “To _Rush?_ ” He gestured to Rush, who was humming to himself, sleepy-eyed, still moving his fingers in cryptic patterns against the blanket. “Because first of all, Rush is physically incapable of paying attention to anything that doesn’t involve his goddamn cipher, and second of all, he deserves to know! He deserves to know if he’s in the fucking infirmary having a _seizure_ that no human being is supposed to be able to have—“

“Be that as it may,” Jackson said steadily. “He isn’t cleared. And I am not going to let you get yourself thrown off this project. I won’t let it happen. Do you understand me?”

He was looking straight at Young with a frown of truly incredible focus, clearly afraid that Young might, in fact, be too stupid to understand.

Lam looked between the two of them, obviously conflicted. _She_ wasn’t stupid; she had to know she could’ve taken the conversation as actionable, proof of questionable motives if not conspiracy. Maybe Young hadn’t given her enough credit: she said nothing. After a long and uncomfortable stretch of time had passed, she cleared her throat. “Regardless of what’s causing the neuronal activity,” she said haltingly, “at this point our first priority is figuring out how to control it. Even if it’s not manifesting traditional epileptic symptoms, it _is_ still a seizure, and it’s capable of doing damage. The longer it continues, and the more severe its effects become, the more concerned I am about what that damage might be. He _is_ still human.” She looked at Young, almost defiant. “He’s human. Physiologically, his body just can’t continue to support this.”

“So… what?” Young couldn’t bring himself to look at her, or at Jackson. He looked at Rush instead— Rush and his flawed, too-human body, always trying so hard to shoulder the weight of inhuman things, and always bodyslammed by the human things that came out of nowhere. It didn’t seem fair.

Lam said, “Dr. Tamid—that’s the epileptologist we brought in from Denver— and Dr. Alaniz have put together a combination of anti-epileptics and anesthetics that are typically used to treat seizures that won’t break. We’re going to titrate up from a standard dose to see if we can manage to normalize his EEG at all. Problematically, the drugs will almost certainly put him to sleep, so he may not be able to describe the subjective effectiveness to us. But we’ll be able to see the objective effects on the EEG.”

“Okay,” Young said.

“Okay?” Lam looked at him almost uncertainly, like she was seeking his approval. He didn’t know why that would be.

“Yeah,” he said. And then, because Rush was conscious, at least, even if there was probably no standard by which anyone would say he was capable of giving consent, he turned back to the bed. “Rush,” he said. “ _Rush._ ”

Rush didn’t respond to his name, or to Young’s careful jostling of his shoulder. Young hesitated, and then remembered the gentle, casual way that Alaniz had reached out and taken hold of Rush’s chin. He tried to imitate it, hoping it wouldn’t look overfamiliar to Lam or Jackson. But touching the soft scruff of beard along Rush’s jawline was like taking a sucker punch to the gut, the way the air went out of you all at once and you kind of thought you were dying, even while your higher brain functions assured you that everything was good. The body was like that, all animal instincts that were stupid and out to sabotage you. Case in point: objectively speaking, Young was absolutely fine, even when he’d drawn Rush’s attention so that Rush’s uncomfortably dark eyes fixed on him— even when Rush made a soft questioning sound and turned his face into Young’s hand.

Young swallowed. “Hey,” he said. “Listen. We’re going to give you some medication. It’s probably going to put you to sleep. But it’s going to help with— with what you’re hearing.”

“Music,” Rush murmured, his eyes straying away.

“Yeah. The music.”

“I don’t need your help.”

Young didn’t know what to say to that. “I think you do need our help,” he said at last. “You can yell at me about it later, okay? I promise to listen.”

But Rush had already tuned out— literally, switched over to whatever million-year-old, intergalactic station was offering him a stronger signal than Young could manage. Even when Young risked stroking a thumb along his jawline, trying to get his attention, he couldn’t manage to make Rush’s eyes focus on him again.

“What happens if this doesn’t work?” Jackson asked Lam in a low voice, behind Young.

She hesitated. “Keller’s working with McKay and Sheppard,” she said. “Depending on Sheppard’s test results… if this _is_ some kind of— God, I don’t even know, Ancient epigenetic land mine, that may be our best option. At the very least, Sheppard has the most insight into what actually happened on that planet. Maybe he can suggest some avenues of exploration.”

“Right,” Jackson said, sounding drained. “Some avenues of exploration.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Lam said. She didn’t sound angry, just tired. “This is everyone’s first priority. Everyone in two galaxies, _everyone_. You think I don’t know how important this man is? You think _I_ don’t?”

Young didn’t hear Jackson’s response. He was biting down on his own response, which was instinctive. No, he thought to himself, drawing his hand back from where he’d been cradling the sharp, insensate plane of Rush’s face. I don’t. I think you’ve got no goddamn clue.

* * *

Alaniz was the one who pushed the medication to Rush’s IV. She looked more drawn than when Young had last seen her. She met his eyes briefly and then looked away quickly from him, which he thought was probably not an optimistic sign. But then he thought that Alaniz was the kind of person who didn’t back away from painful confrontations, and that if she couldn’t stand to look at him, then the problem might be that there was something in his face that was objectively difficult to look at. It seemed possible to him that this was true.

“Dr. Rush,” she said carefully, when she had put in the needle and allowed a few seconds to elapse. “Are you with us?”

Rush frowned hazily and stirred, but didn’t open his eyes.

“Let’s titrate up,” Lam said.

Alaniz sought out Young’s gaze again. “Talk to him,” she said. “We know he responds to you.”

Young didn’t want to. At first he wasn’t sure why. It occurred to him pretty quickly that he was scared Rush wouldn’t hear him; scared of what it might mean if Rush didn’t hear him, and scared, maybe, of what it meant that Alaniz would ask him to do this. Scared of what it might imply.

But: “Hey,” he said in a rough voice. “Hotshot. You in there?”

Rush made a dissatisfied sound that was so familiar it made tears prick at the back of Young’s eyes. “No,” he said, managing to slur the single syllable.

Young laughed unsteadily. “Yeah,” he said. “I think maybe you are.”

Rush wrinkled his nose and frowned deeply. “Why d’you… call me that,” he mumbled.

“Because you’re a hotshot,” Young said. “A math hotshot. The most hotshot of all hotshots.”

“Sarcasm.”

“No,” Young said, even though that wasn’t entirely, maybe, completely, strictly true.

“Dr. Rush,” Lam interrupted from the other side of the gurney, where she was monitoring the EEG machine, “we’re giving you a medication that’s going to make you sleepy. Before that happens, I need you to tell us what you’re experiencing. Are you still seeing and hearing anything unusual?”

Rush frowned again in what looked like consternation. “Dunno,” he said.

“You don’t know?”

“Which…” Rush was obviously struggling to get the words out. “One place is real.”

“The courtyard,” Young said, understanding. “The courtyard isn’t real. You’re in the infirmary, here, with us. We’re all real.”

Rush blinked and cracked his eyes to gaze sleepily at Young. “I know _you’re_ real. Obviously.”

“Good,” Young said hoarsely. “Good.”

“Wyoming,” Rush said, managing to sound disgusted. “Fuck you.”

“Hey.” Young forced a weak smile. “See if I ever take you there.”

Rush closed his eyes again.

“Let’s try titrating up,” Lam said. Then to Rush, raising her voice slightly: “Dr Rush. Are you still hearing music?”

Rush _hmm_ ed faintly. “Quiet,” he said. “It’s quiet. Not burning the generator.”

Lam looked at Young, uncomprehending. He shrugged. “What does that mean?” he asked Rush.

“The whole earth,” Rush said indistinctly. But he was starting to go under; Young could tell. He was losing the edge of precision that was always there when he was awake, even if muffled by drugs or exhaustion— the edge of precision that made him Rush.

“Stay with us for a sec,” Young said, leaning closer. “The whole earth what?”

“Was found to be.” Rush managed one drowsy blink. “Literally alive.”

Alaniz looked at Lam and shook her head. “It’s no good,” she said. “By the time we get him to a point where he’s not hearing anything, he’s going to be too sedated to talk.”

Lam was studying the EEG. “I think you’re right. He’s starting to approach a normal baseline, but already—“

“You want me to continue at this dosage?”

“Let’s try titrating up a little more. I’d really like to break the seizure, but I’ll settle for tamping down the excitation as much as possible, if we can’t.”

Young gave into impulse and let himself rest his hand against Rush’s head. “Go to sleep,” he murmured. “It’s okay.”

Rush made a fretful noise and turned towards him a little. “Piano.”

Young thought that he was most likely more than ninety percent asleep. But he said haltingly, “Yeah. When you get out of here, I’ll get you a piano. A good one. I promise. Not just an upright.”

Rush said nothing. His breathing had evened out.

“He’s at baseline,” Lam said, sounding relieved. “More or less.”

Alaniz, however, didn’t look relieved. “That was a significant dose,” she said, sounding tense. “Just to break the seizure. If we have to up it again—“

Lam bit her lip. “I’m aware of the problem.”

“Is ketamine an option?”

“I want to hear from Atlantis first.”

Alaniz made an affirmative noise, and was quiet for a moment. “Depending on what the full data from the gene-protein assay looks like,” she said, “we should be thinking about the possibility of silencing one or all of the genes you described. CRISPR interference is—“

“No.” Lam had taken out a tablet device, and was keying something into it.

“I mean, there are other methods, but that seems like the most obvious choice for—“

“No. I mean we’re not silencing his genes.”

Alaniz looked bewildered. “We have no other way of treating his epilepsy.”

“I know,” Lam said. Her face was set.

“I looked at the MRI. Any surgical intervention would leave him with major deficits.”

“I _know_ ,” Lam said. She put the tablet down. After a moment, she brought a hand up to cover half her face. It was a minute or so before she spoke again. “At any rate, it’s not my call. Anything we do will have to be cleared by General Landry, General O’Neill, and a representative of the IOA.”

Alaniz was staring at her. Her gaze swung to Young, and then to Jackson. “You can’t be serious,” she said. “You can’t be suggesting that two USAF generals and a civilian member of an organization that, for fuck’s sake, has the word _oversight_ in its name would prevent life-saving medical treatment from being carried out just because— what? It might spoil a really good Ancient gene sample that they need to pass some kind of million-year-old test?”

“You don’t know all the facts,” Lam said tiredly. She was being careful not to look at Jackson or Young.

“Then _tell_ me!”

Young had stayed hunched in his chair throughout the conversation. He felt like a gargoyle, chipped out of rock and unable to change his posture. It seemed like a reasonable way to imagine himself: dumb, immobile, hardened and grotesque. He was surprised when his throat cleared itself to answer, when his mouth moved. “She can’t,” he said. His voice was low and gravelly. “She has to get clearance even to tell you. The good news is—“

He was rising, forcing himself out of the chair, even though it hurt almost every part of him. He held onto the back of the chair with an iron grip. “The good news is,” he repeated, and forged on. “That she’ll definitely do everything possible to keep him alive. Isn’t that right? Worrying about his safety is her job. Her _job_.”

His arm jerked, and suddenly the chair was spinning out of his hand, across the infirmary floor. He watched it happen as though in slow motion, the sound coming only later, at a considerable delay. Mechanically, he tried to calculate the distance that would be required for that much of a pause, how far he’d have to be away, but he couldn’t do it. He wasn’t smart enough. Rush could’ve done it, he thought.

And then the impact, and Jackson jumping forwards and saying, “Whoa—okay, I think everyone needs an interval, maybe, like maybe just a— just a _miniature_ break,” and his hands on Young’s biceps, just sort of _holding_ him for a moment, which Young didn’t understand; he didn’t understand why Jackson would be holding him like that, hard and steady and solid, sort of comforting, until he realized it was what you’d do with a white-eyed horse when you weren’t sure what it would do next. By the time he’d had the thought, Jackson was using gentle nudges to steer him towards the exit, carrying most of Young’s weight.

“I can’t,” Young said. “I have to—“

But they were already out of the infirmary and in the stark light of the utilitarian hallway, so much like all the other utilitarian hallways of Young’s career.

“No, come on,” Jackson said. “Come on. There’s nothing you can do.”

He was pulling Young through a door and into an empty laboratory, where Young could sit on a cold molded-metal chair. There were computers in the room, all showing different stages of the same morphing-rainbow screensaver. It was surreal, Young thought; disorienting, really. He stared at the multicolored pixels whose paths kept expanding and contracting within the unmoving walls of their boxes. “I shouldn’t have brought him here,” he said. He put in his head in his hands.

“You had to,” Jackson said. “You _had_ to.” He was leaning against the wall. For the first time, Young saw that he was wearing a sweatshirt, one of those corny Colorful Colorado sweatshirts that you only ever saw for sale at gas stations, where Jackson must have gotten it, probably in the course of some mission, since Jackson wasn’t really much of a sweatshirt guy, and then Young was thinking about the stupid sweatshirt he’d bought for Rush in Grand Junction, and he didn’t understand how Jackson could say what he’d said.

“I should’ve called you,” he whispered.

Jackson said, “I would’ve told you to bring him here. You saved his life. That’s all you did. Not that it matters, because we’re where we are now, regardless. All that matters is where we go from here.”

Young made an indistinct noise, one that was meant to signal agreement but mostly ended up sounding hopeless.

“Preferably with fewer chairs being thrown,” Jackson added. “In general, I find the degree that you’re taken seriously in the world is almost always inversely proportional to the number of chairs you throw.”

“Yeah,” Young said.

“Not that I don’t understand the impulse. Inasmuch as one man can ever understand another man’s impulses, his motivations, his emotions…” Jackson let the spiraling elaboration of the sentence die there. “Speaking of which. Um.”

Young had his head down, but was aware of Jackson’s eyes on him: gentle, careful, but somehow clinical in their inspection.

There was a long silence before Jackson said, “Can I ask…?”

“No,” Young said, without moving.

“Right,” Jackson said. Then, after another awkward silence, “It just seems like… tactically relevant information.”

It was, Young knew. But it was all tactical, wasn’t it? All of it. All of the information. That was what people like Jackson didn’t understand, that maybe even people like David understood better. Sometimes the line between shooting someone and not shooting someone could be as thin as the way they lifted up their head for a second while you were watching through the scope of your rifle, and they closed their eyes like they were so hungry for sun that the two little crescents of their eyelids were all that was keeping them from starving, and you just couldn’t shoot someone who was that goddamn hungry for sun. There was always at least a thread of something like that underneath. The Lucian girl that Rush had saved, when they should’ve shot her. She had value as an asset, but there had been some other reason. Something in her that Rush had seen, something that wasn’t even really _in_ her, but at least partly in Rush himself. How did you control for that, for the kind of tactical information that was just, Young thought, the confession that I have also been a creature who was hungry for the sun?

You didn’t. You couldn’t. You accepted there would be those moments. Maybe you were supposed to get somebody else to take the shot. It was one of those things you lived with, until the day arrived when you realized you were ready to step in front of the bullet, no matter whose shot it was. And then, as Jackson would say, all that mattered was where you were willing to go from there.

Young lifted his head and met Jackson’s gaze. “It’s not,” he said. “No more chair-throwing. I promise.”

“Really?” Jackson looked skeptical.

“Cross my heart.” As proof, Young offered a brief unserious gesture across the center of his chest. His hand touched the thin t-shirt he was wearing as he did so, and he felt something like a spark— static electricity, maybe, from the equipment around them, the infrastructure of the building, but all the same it made him feel weirdly like he’d sworn an oath. Not the oath he’d pretended to, but another one. He didn’t know what it was yet. He would, he thought with a sense of uneasiness, have to wait and see.


	30. What We Carried For Each Other

Sheppard fidgets under the weight of all the electrodes that are currently attached to his scalp. The forest of wires extruding from them seems like it ought to be part of his body, but it feels dead. It’s got no sensation. It’s closed to him. That’s distracting, the way he can’t push himself into it, the way he does with the drones and the engines and the infrastructure of Atlantis. It’s weird being cut-off from something so close and so electric; he feels rebuffed. He doesn’t like it.

He raises his hand to pick at one of the sticky patches, and McKay, without even looking up from his computer, snaps, “Stop that!”

“Stop what?” Sheppard says, shoving his hands behind his back guiltily.

“You’re going to mess with the readings. Didn’t MKULTRA-lite have you do this?”

“Who?” Sheppard asks.

McKay waves a distracted hand. “You know. The Area 51 guys who built half the rig we’re using. They’re working on psychic communication, right? Like the men who stare at goats, but, um, what’s the word I’m looking for? —Oh, yes: stupider.”

Sheppard rolls his eyes. “They’re not working on _psychic communication_ , Rodney. They’re trying to make a wearable interface that’ll let gene carriers communicate with the Antarctic chair without having to be forty feet down in the middle of a glacier, which is usually somewhat inconvenient, like when crazy space aliens launch an interstellar sneak attack.”

“They should just station someone in Antarctica and go back to worrying about making me ZPMs.”

“Yeah, well, most of our gene carriers are civilians, and they’re not exactly going to volunteer for the position.”

“They don’t have to volunteer. Just because they’re civilians doesn’t mean they can’t be—“ McKay stops.

Sheppard doesn’t look at McKay. He keeps moving restlessly around the chair room’s underwater-colored floor. The way the wires bundle back towards the EEG machine makes him feel like there’s a leash on him. He’s never liked being leashed. By family or Air Force, by friendship or marriage, by chains of authority or chains of grief, by loyalty, by retribution, by anything at all, anything, any kind of chain.

“What?” he says flatly, when he can tell that McKay isn’t going to finish his sentence. “Doesn’t mean they can’t be what?”

“—It’s possible that what I was going to say might have been perceived as undiplomatic,” McKay says. “Given the circumstances.” He seems uncharacteristically cowed, or maybe just careful.

The circumstances.

Sheppard thinks that Rush would like Antarctica, actually. He would like it for the same reasons that Sheppard had liked it: a landscape that echoed and affirmed his essential aloneness in the world, a literal stretch of miles between himself and civilization that he could point to and say, _See, there it is_. The close-mouthedness that settled on people the longer they were there— literal, again, that close-mouthedness, the tendency not only to talk less but to cut your words short in the cold. You developed a McMurdo accent after a while, choppy and punctuated by silences that had their own syntax. Sheppard had felt like he’d shown up already fluent in it.

And then the ice, blue and otherworldly. Sheppard had grown up knowing ice only as a slowing-down of water, an intermediate stage. He’d been skiing, of course, and in Afghanistan, there’d been snow on the mountains, but the ice in Antarctica was different. In some places it had existed for a million years. You could cut into it and, like bone, it would show you the layers of everything it’d lived through, all the way from nuclear testing back to the Stone Age: the rise of agriculture, coal, and chlorofluorocarbons, the history of modern man. There were caves made of ice, crevasses the size of cathedrals that you could crawl into, and he’d wanted to see the inside of one, so he did. He looked up at the silent walls that held so much evidence of survival. He put his gloved hand against the ice and thought it was a comfort to encounter something so much bigger and colder than him.

Rush, he thinks, is a person who would appreciate ice.

“So you’re being diplomatic now,” he says to McKay, mostly because he can’t think of anything else to say or how to say it, so he might as well fall back on their everyday banter.

McKay seems aware of the choice, and relieved. “What, you’re going to insult me? It’s your math boyfriend I’m trying to save here.”

“He’s not my _math boyfriend_ ,” Sheppard says. “He’s—“

He doesn’t know what Rush is. He has a hard time separating Rush from the whole infrastructure of the Ancients, from everything they left behind. And, sure, that’s a part of what Sheppard feels— that for both of them, him and Rush, there’s a microscopic little piece embedded in every one of their cells that has its place in that infrastructure of the left-behind, the ruin, the echo, the skeleton-buried-with-grave-goods whose bones and treasures stretch across the universe. He doesn’t know what that makes him and Rush, but he knows that Rush feels it, that ghostly pinprick replicated trillions and trillions of times.

“—Look,” Sheppard says. “He’s just important, all right?”

“Yes. Thanks. I think Dr. Lam’s muted levels of increasing hysteria have made that quite clear. Although she’s kind of cute when she’s hysterical, so—”

“ _Rodney._ ”

“What, I’m not allowed to find a silver lining in the situation?” McKay smacks the EEG machine he’s been connecting to his computer. “Okay, this should be rigged up. As soon as Jennifer gets here—“

“Speak of the devil,” Keller says, wheeling another cart into the room. The cart is toting an array of machinery and two pieces of small, delicate, Ancient-looking hardware. “You ready to go, John?”

Sheppard’s gaze fixes on the little silver curls of hardware. They’re beautiful, actually. They look like pieces of jewelry. But he knows what they’re actually for, and some primitive part of his brain wants them out of the room.

Keller catches him looking. “It’ll be fine,” she says. “It’s not going to hurt. I promise. You’ll probably feel a little disoriented.”

Sheppard swallows. “Right.”

“C’mon, c’mon,” McKay says impatiently. “What’s the hold-up? Usually you love getting to pretend that you’re the Sorcerer King of Atlantis.”

“For the last time, McKay,” Sheppard says, “I’m not joining your DnD club.”

He opts to tune out the predictable rant— huffy, indignant, and defensive— about how McKay spent his childhood making nuclear bombs, not dressing up like elf warriors, and did Sheppard know that he was practically raised by the CIA, and did Sheppard think that with multiple PhDs he was just going to ignore the fact that the physiology of dragons was biologically improbable. Sheppard’s heard it all before. He focuses on the chair instead.

To him, it’s always looked grown, not made— the slight irregularities in its design suggesting the way that roots and vines swallow up walls. Whatever metal it’s made from is a silvery-brown color, with the smoothed-down and hollowed-out texture of an old piece of driftwood. Sheppard thinks about the sea every time he sits in it: something about the noise of the sea, its size; the sensation of coming off the board when you’re surfing and being uncertain, by the time you hit the water, of your orientation: the relative positions of ocean, air, land. There are roots and vines in the sea, too, and other types of things that eat shipwrecks, or spit them out in unrecognizable forms.

He thinks about the sea this time, too, when he drops into the chair and lets his head rest against the upper panel’s humming aquarium glow. He is holding his breath, shutting his eyes, crashing under the water. The reason it’s hard for him to separate the ocean, air, and land is because they’re basically one and the same to him. He can breathe in the ocean and walk in the air; the land is transparent and unsolid. He can see through every wall in Atlantis. He is electric. He is kept alive by the heartbeat of the ZPM. He has a thousand limbs, and they are piers and they are towers. Water and energy and coolant run through his arteries. He spreads two of his hands flat against the armrests of the chair and marvels at the precariousness of having hands. He is surprised by the sweltering and penetrable stochasticity of being organic. Every time, he marvels at it, because every time is the first time that he has existed. In a manner of speaking. You know. More or less. It makes his head hurt if he thinks about it too long, who he is and how long he’s been that who, exactly.

“…never seen an EEG from Colonel Sheppard when he’s using the control chair. The one we have on file is from General O’Neill, and it’s…”

Voices blur. He’s vaguely aware that he should listen.

“…possible that whatever happened on Planet Bait and Switch or the magical Ancient city Sheppard says he went to _is_ affecting him?”

“Yes, it’s possible. But…”

“… decent readings, at least, from him _and_ the mechanical broadcast, which should…”

“Okay. The headset I have is using Dr. Lam’s estimates of the frequencies we’ll need to target. Does that seem to be…”

“… ballpark. Worst case, Sheppard gets to be stupid for half an hour, which, let’s face it, is not going to be that much of a…”

“Thanks, McKay,” Sheppard manages, because he can just about put together a Sheppard-shaped consciousness in an urgent situation, for instance if Rodney’s shit-talking him.

“What?” McKay says defensively. “I’m just saying that we don’t have to worry about the psychological trauma that someone like, you know, _me_ would experience!”

Sheppard wishes he could roll his eyes. But he can’t quite remember what that’s supposed to feel like, or how the mechanics of it are supposed to work. Anyway, he’s distracted by a small power irregularity in the gate room. He can’t see it, but he can kind of sense it, like an ant biting his energy conduit. He makes a mental note to have a look at it later.

“Let’s give this a try,” Keller says. “Keep an eye on the frequencies the chair’s emitting that _don’t_ seem to be reflected in Colonel Sheppard’s neural fluctuations; let’s work on the assumption that these may be relevant to Dr. Rush’s…”

The mention of Rush shakes Sheppard’s tenuous mental control just enough that he fades out into Atlantis for a little while, restless with a kind of undirected longing— for Rush, or for that other, distant city— that makes his star drive briefly hum. Parts of him, pieces, remember when they were the other city. Panels of glass and trinium ornaments in the shapes of insects and flowers, in parts of Atlantis that Sheppard has never found. Someone carried them on starships for centuries, into the void where a galaxy ended, and through the dark till a new one began. Maybe it’s wrong to say they remember; remembering is human. But something survives. Something endures in them.

“…Sheppard? Hello? Sheppard?”

“Yeah,” Sheppard says vaguely. Even to himself he sounds drugged.

“Try not to move. Dr. Keller’s going to attach the transdermal oscillation-interference devices to your head now.”

“We really…” Sheppard mumbles, “…gotta… work on that name.”

He feels Keller’s cool, precise fingers touching his right temple, and then the colder texture of something metal, no larger than a dime. A brief pressure, a prick of pain, and then the same touch on the other side of his forehead. He can’t seem to integrate the devices, which he finds weird and confusing. He keeps trying to communicate with them, querying them and getting no sign of life back, probing them, tasting their electromagnetic potential, distracted from the room’s slower and less immediate human conversation until he’s rocked by a sudden incinerating _flash of power_ that _feels_ so bright he instinctively pulls away, squinting even with his eyes closed as he—

is—

 

_missing_

 

 

 

Someone’s—missing—

He can’t feel his—

 

“Sheppard?”

 

Is he missing Sheppard?  
Or is Sheppard the part who—  
“Adjust—“  
“I’m—“  
“The—“  
“Damn it—“  
He can’t feel his towers.  
He can’t _feel_ them oh fuck he can’t feel his ZPM oh fuck Oh

 

“I’m adjusting, I’m—“ He’s— He is but he wasn’t a second ago and he thinks he was at some  
“I mean, do we think it’s—“point before that but his sense of time is all fucked up. Something’s wrong.  
“We need for him to talk if—“Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong. This isn’t how it’s supposed to work.  
 

Everything is dead except some parts of him that aren’t dead but he doesn’t know how to move them  
but he tries very gingerly moving one of the hands that’s left and, like, oh, man, remember Thing  
from the Addams Family? Because that’s what it feels like, like he’s a bunch of Things all sort of  
in the same body and meeting each other, “Hey, Thing,” “What’s happening, Thing,” “How you doing?” And  
it gets better, it does get better, he breathes and he’s aware he has a heart and lungs and a mouth  
and he swallows and practices making words with it and he can think of some words to say he can

“What…”

“Sheppard! Good, he’s back with us.”

“John, can you describe the effect of the interference devices? The EEG is showing that they’ve blocked your synchronization with the chair, but—“

“I can’t…” His tonguefeels thick.He thinks he’s Sheppard; he is, right? He has to be Sheppard. But then he’s not sure about all the parts he’s missing. “I can’t feel— Something’s— _cut off._ ”

“Yes. Okay. Good. You shouldn’t be receiving any input from Atlantis. You shouldn’t be able to sync your neural activity with it.”

“It feels—“

Dead. It feels dead. And he knows without looking that underneath his head there’s none of the underwater-blue bioluminescence that marks the waking-up and livingness of the chair, because the chair doesn’t recognize him as part of its body or it doesn’t know that it’s part of his body or any way you want to put it because to it he’s the one who’s dead, and he queries it but he can’t make it warm to his presence because it’s the chair that’s right; he _is_ the one who’s dead, he’s dead, dead, dead.

“I feel—” he says. “Dead.” His head is killing him. “Why can’t I— _think_ ; I can’t—“

“We’re fine-tuning the interference that the devices are broadcasting.” That voice is— he almost has it. Strawberry-blond hair, chirp-chirp-chirping her way through halls of Atlantis, oblivious to the age embedded in them, so human it hurts. “It’s probably blocking some of your normal cognitive activity. I don’t want to waste time trying to get it perfect, though, because the team on Earth is going to have to start from scratch. I just want to confirm that we’re effectively blocking all Ancient influence on your brain.”

“You make it sound like he’s being mind-controlled. He’s not the Lantean Candidate.” That’s McKay. Rodney. He knows who that is.

“It’s more like he’s the one doing the mind-controlling.”

“Great. Now I feel like I’m usurping the agency of the puddlejumpers.”

“Well, I don’t know, Rodney, what do you want me to say? There _is_ an element of mental calibration involved; you already knew that.”

“I’m just saying, if I had wanted an army of mindless robots, I would already have made one.”

“Is that supposed to be the moral high ground? Because—“

“Guys,” Sheppard interrupts. He’s feeling a little bit less dead and made from glued-together pieces, but now he mostly feels lead-limbed and incredibly sick. “Just… tell me when you’re going to take these things off.”

“I just have to take a few more measurements. I’m sorry, John. I didn’t realize it would be so distressing.”

“It’s fine,” Sheppard says. “I’m fine. I just want to know, I just– I want to know when you’re going to take them off.”

The answer is: after an indeterminate period of time that Sheppard spends exploring the sensation of being solely human, which he hasn’t felt in a long time, and which, as it turns out, kind of sucks. Was he like this _before?_ Did he move through the world lurching and stilted, compressed down and rigidly constrained and resentful? Yeah: he knows the answer. He did. He felt, with sensors like cilia at the very edges of his being, that he could have been _other_ — just _other_ , not more or less— and somehow by accident he’d gotten stuck in his body and didn’t know how to get out. Sometimes he’d thought about dying in an abstract way, and maybe teased at it a little, pressing his palms of his hands against the glass wall of its enclosure to see if it would come out and roar at him, but he hadn’t wanted to die. He’d just been trying to get a good look at— at—

“Uh,” he says, and swallows hard, tasting something ripe and sour. “I should probably tell you that I’m gonna barf in about two minutes.”

So that starts a whole chain of action rolling, with Keller— _Keller_ , Keller of the chirps and the strawberry-blond hair— saying, “Sit up! Sit up!” and McKay saying, “Try to avoid any important equipment,” and Keller saying, “ _Rodney_ ,” and McKay saying, “What?”

Sheppard wraps his arms around himself and leans forward and tries to keep the contents of his stomach in his stomach. He says kind of indistinctly, “It’s not the tech. It just— takes some getting used to, is all.”

“Okay,” Keller says, not sounding totally convinced. “Well, Dr. Lam can always administer an anti-emetic to Rush if he has the same reaction. It’s hard to know what to expect in his case, with the source of the influence he’s experiencing still unknown. But conscious and _not_ catatonic’s got to be better than unconscious and, you know, catatonic."

“Yeah,” Sheppard says, lying back down in the chair and awkwardly pulling his knees to his chest. “Right.”

It _is_ better. It’s better. He saw the video that Lam sent in her databurst. Rush isn’t trying to interface with an Atlantis. The white city, wherever it had been, Altera, maybe, had been more alien than Atlantis, and older, like the Antarctic ice, and Rush was hungry for something bigger and colder than his own body. He _is_ hungry; he still is. Sheppard recognizes the feeling. The urge to push your hands against the ice, against the glass, against the very edge of dissolution.

He had wanted to stay in that other city, too. Some nights he dreams that he still wants to stay there. But he’s not sure how much of that is Atlantis and how much is him. Atlantis wants to go back to an earlier era, a time it senses existed, before some invisible but important split had entered the world like the tipping point of nuclear fission: a criticality accident from which poison spread, or rather particles that kept on splitting and splitting atoms. The Alterans exiled from their galaxy. The plague. The collapse of their civilization. The animal-people of the Wraith. There must have been a time— a moment— when the fundamental structure had held steady. If they could cross galaxies, perhaps they could roll back the eons. They could _still reach it_ , that white city; it wasn’t too late; and maybe, just maybe, once they reached it they would understand how to hold the world together, how to stay whole, how to stop the crack.

“John?” Keller’s worried face, looming large in front of him. “I’m going to take the interference devices off now. Is that okay?”

Sheppard nods jerkily and turns to give her access to them.

There’s a jolt as the devices depower and then an inkblot of pain on each of Sheppard’s temples as Keller unfastens the devices, briefly swabs the sites where they were attached, and tapes an incongruous Band-Aid on each little puncture.

Sheppard hardly notices. The punctures are small, and he is suddenly so vast. The control chair is warm against him, eager as a mother whose child can sink back into her body through the inconsequential and permeable medium of her skin, and he _is_ the chair, breathing electric and toeing its roots throughout the city; he is driftwood and the trinium kelp that wraps it wet and possessive to the ocean’s bed, and he tastes salt from the waves breaking along his eastern pier-line and compensates for the temperature fluctuations caused by the nearly-setting sun’s energetic ruby-red-grapefruit extrusions. He is vast and he is warm and he is _welcome_ — although, he supposes, he’s the one who’s welcoming himself. But he does welcome himself. He _is_ welcome. He is so glad to once more be what he is, and it occurs to him that it’s a thought he hasn’t had very often, and he doesn’t really know where that thought is coming from, but he thinks it’s coming from all of his component parts: the parts of him that hurt and think and grieve and remember; the parts that can only do those things with him; the parts that are too alien to have a translation. Will Sheppard still feel this way when he’s back to being just a human body? Will it make him uneasy? Maybe he’s only glad because the city is glad. Maybe he’s just giving in. But he remembers getting in bar fights after Holland died, when he was stateside, fights that he invariably picked— not because he wanted to hurt, although he did want to hurt, and he wanted a reason to hurt that he could understand— but because he wanted some dirtbag airman to rearrange his face or break something important, do some damage to an organ that Sheppard could stand to lose, because he _did not want to be himself anymore_ and that was the easiest way he knew how to fix it: find a way to effect a change drastic enough that your body no longer felt like you.

Back then, he only thought in terms of destruction. Tear something down, bomb it to shit; that was his kind of change. It never occurred to him that he could gain parts, not just lose them. Then when he started to get in tune with Atlantis and realize what it was offering him, he assumed there was a trade involved: an eye for an eye, an arm for an arm, a heart for a heart. He doesn’t know now if there is or there isn’t. He thinks that maybe what Atlantis is offering him is mostly love. But there are trades involved in love. He knows it. He _knows_ it.

“You can’t do this to Rush,” he whispers. His voice comes out hoarse. He opens his eyes as he powers down the chair. He hadn’t realized they were closed. It’s hard to notice the loss of a single stream of input.

Keller looks at him, uncomprehending. “Because of the physical effects? If they don’t wear off, we can just medicate him, like I told you—“

“No,” Sheppard says. “Not the physical effects.”

He doesn’t try to explain what Keller isn’t capable of understanding. He learned that lesson a long time ago.

“We don’t have any other options,” Keller says. She spreads her hands helplessly. “I mean—“

“Sheppard,” McKay says. He’s wearing a weirdly serious look, a tilted-head look capped off with his worried little lopsided frown. “She’s right. It doesn’t have to be permanent— the SGC can work out a better solution. But we’ve got a very limited window of time before— well, I don’t know what exactly’ll happen, but it’s going to be something that nobody wants happening.”

Sheppard looks away. His tongue works in his mouth: an old tic, like he doesn’t know how to say what he wants to say. “I know,” he says.

“So…?” McKay makes a more typical McKay-face, all impatience teetering on action.

Sheppard shrugs jerkily. “I don’t know. Can I take these electrodes off yet? I feel like you’re interrogating me about a murder and you’re about to point out inconsistencies in my statement.”

McKay narrows his eyes. “You haven’t murdered anyone, have you?”

Keller rolls her eyes at him and turns to Sheppard. “Yes.”

Sheppard stands and starts pulling the little patches off him. “ _How_ long have you worked for the military?” he asks McKay.

McKay frowns. “Pretty much my whole life.”

“Obviously you weren’t listening the day you got told that the one question you never ask somebody in the service is, So, have you ever killed anyone?”

He can see the subtly stricken look on McKay’s face, before it changes to one of resentful guilt. “Oh, come on. I wasn’t— It’s not like I was trying to— It’s not like that—“

“It’s not like that what?” Sheppard asks. He’s fishing the last of the electrodes out of his hair. “Not like it counts?”

McKay doesn’t say anything, but his silence is pretty damning.

“It counts,” Sheppard says flatly. “It all counts.”

He stalks out of the room, rubbing a hand through the mess the electrodes had made of his hair. The lights in the hallway seem to flicker, acknowledging his presence. He can feel their own presence, mechanical and ghostly, somewhere at the back of his head. He could almost, _almost_ make them do whatever he wanted, the way he thinks weapons into being when he’s in the chair. All it would take is a little change, a little surrender— a little trade. Lights can’t ask for that, but he feels like they’re asking for it; feels irritable and guilty.

“I want to be _alone,_ ” he says, more forcefully than he intended. “I can’t be responsible for you too, okay? I can’t do it. So just— leave me alone!”

A whole stretch of the hallway blinks out, leaving him in near-darkness.

Sheppard sighs, and gropes for the wall with a hand. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

Circuits hum under his fingertips, cycling through their normal procedures. After a minute, the lights start to cautiously warm back up.

Just for a second, Sheppard gives into exhaustion and turns to lean forward against the wall. His forehead touches its metal surface. It ought to feel like the same kind of contact that’d existed between the electrodes and his skin. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t feel like that at all.

“ _This_ is what you want to be a part of?” he says to the metal softly, almost under his breath. “Really? This?”

Atlantis doesn’t answer. Atlantis isn’t a thing that _can_ answer. And, anyway, he knows the answer already. He just doesn’t know what to do with it.

He’s tired, he thinks. He’s tired, and when he goes to sleep tonight, if he’s lucky he’ll dream that he’s a water filtration system or a power conduit or a vent. He won’t dream that he’s Rush, lost somewhere in his own mind, too hungry by far and much much too eager to make the sacrifices that this kind of love might ask him for, unwilling to consider any safer offer. He won’t dream the dreams he dreads for reasons that don’t bear examining, the ones that leave him confused, disoriented, and claustrophobic, gasping for breath and digging at his skin to get out of the body that chains him to one incarnation, that makes its own demands and has its own secret economy and costs that he doesn’t want to pay, and in the dreams he pays and pays them, and he doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want to dream that he’s him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would be remiss in not acknowledging a certain spiritual lineage that a paragraph in this chapter has from an article that David Grossman wrote for the _New Yorker_ in 2009 about Bruno Schulz called ["The Age of Genius."](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/06/08/the-age-of-genius)


	31. Chapter 31

_alifbatsimmadetespfaygematetimmaimmatkaflathamyenuotpayqefreshesktafuspvaya_

 

 

Axiom.

 

 

 _crotchet restfay4latha4immat4fay4 (fay4)esp4 (fay4)esp4_  
_crotchet resttaf2,gem3,ot3taf2,gem3,ot3 crotchet resttaf2,gem3,ot3_  
_ot1ot1_

 _crotchet rest fay4latha4immat4fay4(my4)ot1 (my4)ot4_  
_crotchet rest taf2,gem3,ot3 taf2,gem3,ot3 crotchet resttaf2,gem3,ot3_  
_ot1ot1_

 _crotchet restfay4latha4immat4fay4_  
_crotchet resttaf2,gem3,ot3taf2,gem3,ot3_  
_ot1_

 _(fay4)esp4(taf4)esk3 (ot3)esk3(ot3)esk3esk3_  
_crotchet resttaf2,gem3,ot3 taf2,gem3,ot3crotchet rest kaf2,esk2,gem3 kaf2,esk2,gem3_  
_ot1fay1_

__

_(taf3)esk3 (esk3)ot3 ot3_  
_crotchet resttaf2,gem3,ot3 taf2,gem3,ot3crotchet rest taf2,gem3,ot3 taf2,gem3,ot3_  
_ot1ot1_

 

No. That wasn’t right.

 

He

 

is he going to react to pain stimulus because when I attach these suckers there’s going to be a little prick and I need him not to move because right now I’ve got them where I need them it’s hard to say at this point he’s pretty drugged but his eeg is difficult to interpret to say the least I know and to be honest I’m not super loving the level of stability we’re at now Keller and McKay said a voltage burst could fry these things and we haven’t been able to keep him from ramping up what are our options if he starts to seize again I mean we could put him under general anesthesia if we have to it would be better to calibrate the crystals from his baseline well I don’t know if we can bring him down to that how close can we get you’re looking at it but if you’re asking how long we can stay there yeah that’s what I’m asking then I don’t know do we have other options in terms of meds unless you know a place to get ketamine in the greater Colorado Springs area your honor I plead the fifth me neither, so I think we have to rely on the anti-epileptics but there’s only so much of those I can safely give him so let’s try to get this done quick yeah okay can someone hold his head steady just in case yeah is it really necessary to unless you want to put him in restraints because i’m just saying look at him he can’t even move if he physically seizes or oh shit is he awake Dr. Rush are you awake how the fuck can he be awake the amount of benzos he’s on it’s physically it’s I don’t think he can’t talk no shit Rush Rush just relax okay just stay still Alaniz get the interference devices on him so we can Nick I need you to listen to me okay

 

 _et4 my4 immat4 my4 et4 immat4 my4et4 my4 immat4et4 my4 immat4 et4_  
_et4 alif4 immat4 alif4 et4 immat4 alif4et4 alif4 et4 et4 alif4 et4 alif4_  
_et4immat4my4my4 my4 immat4et4alif4 et4_

 

No that’s still not

 

“Every note has a particular shape,” Gloria says, playing with one of the trailing vines that’s crept over the albescent wall. Were there vines there before? Vines that resemble silvered ornaments clinging to the stonework, with dark leaves in the shape of swooping swallows and flowers like bells

He has an uneasy awareness of things growing all around him.

“It bends. It alters. It resonates.”

Growth is good, isn’t it?

“It doesn’t stay like it’s created.”

Young would say—

hotshot if you can hear me just hold still just hold still okay I got you this is

  
He can hear the vines growing, restless and electric. Sputters of lightning in Nikola Tesla’s lab.

“They’re not really vines, of course,” Gloria says. “They’re beautiful, though, aren’t they?”

He thinks the vines might be inside him.

_I am like a slip of a comet_

Ice particles.

 _Come out of space or suddenly engender’d_  
_By heady elements, for no man knows_

Shedding its body as it goes. It won’t ever collect all the pieces.

It should’ve been more careful. It should’ve picked them up. Stupid, _stupid,_ the universe is so fucking stochastic—

And now of course it’s much too late.

 _I have drawn heat from this contagious sun_  
_To not ungentle death now forth I—_

“I need you to listen now, Nick.” __

He _is_ listening. He’s _listening_.

He holds up his hands. He can seen the vines moving underneath the white skin of his wrists, the silver twist of the tendrils unfurling where pale-blue branches of veins had been. He doesn’t mind, or does he mind; he feels— what’s the opposite of enervated? As though someone has put a sudden overabundance of nerves in him.

 _This was the prized, the desirable sight_  
_unsought, presented so easily_

Nick this is gonna hurt a little but I need you to stay with me can you

_Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me_

okay okay that’s it so is he I haven’t turned them on yet I’m concerned about his eeg is there any way we can knock it down even a little because if it spikes above I mean we can go a little higher with the benzos and see if that makes any difference so let’s do that because he’s just eating through these goddamn meds okay but lets be ready to kick on the interference nodes as soon as he seems stable enough because once they’re operating correctly that should knock him—

“Nick.”

He is almost—

“ _Listen._ ”

Life crawling under his skin.

“ _LISTEN.”_

_crotchet restsimma4simma4simma4simma4crotchet restsimma4simma4ot4ot4resh4resh4 simma5simma5_  
_crotchet restsimma3 simma3crotchet restsimma3 ot3 resh3simma4_  
_crotchet restcrotchet restsimma2crotchet restsimma2 crotchet rest resh2 crotchet rest_  
_crotchet rest{simma3,simma4} {simma3,simma4)crotchet rest{simma3,simma4}{ot3,ot4} {resh3,resh4} {simma4,simma5}_

There’s something _missing._

 

a look at his eeg because we should be seeing the effect any minute can we

_crotchet restsimma5simma5resh4resh4ot4ot4 immat4immat4ot4ot4resh4resh4ot4ot4_  
_crotchet restsimma4resh3 ot3 immat3 ot3 resh3ot3_  
_crotchet restcrotchet rest resh2 crotchet restimmat2crotchet rest resh2crotchet rest_  
_crotchet rest {simma5,simma4} {resh4,resh3} {ot4,ot3} {immat4,immat3} {ot4,ot3} {resh4,resh3} {ot4,ot3}_

  
Tintinnalogia.

 

_You must bring these two things together in your mind and let them rest there for ever_

“What two things, Nick?”

_You must bring these two things together_

“I want to hear you say it.”

_Bells and time._

_Bells_

do it now he’s metabolizing the drugs too efficiently and we’re going to lose our chance if

_and_

shit he’s seizing shit Alaniz let’s try to propofol this time can you

_time_

 

okay okay evening out that looks better keep him on the propofol for the time being and let’s try to

_and_

charging please have that crash cart ready just in case what just in case what we can’t predict his physiology at this

 

_the_

five

_ghost_

four

_in_

three

_the_

two

_machine_

one

_is_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Dr. Rush?”

 

 

 

“Dr. Rush, are you with us?”

 

 

 

“He’s definitely conscious.”

 

 

 

“Hotshot, can you say something?”

 

 

 

“I’m going to try adjusting the levels.”

 

 

 

“He looks—“

 

 

 

“It’s possible that he may not have the capacity to understand what’s happening to him.”

 

 

 

“What do you mean by that?”

 

 

 

“The interference the nodes broadcast is designed to suppress the abnormal neural activity he’s been experiencing. But until we calibrate the broadcast more specifically, it may suppress some of his normal neural activity as well. There’s no way to know exactly what.”

 

 

 

“So, what, he can’t even _talk?”_

 

 

 

“Among other things.”

 

 

 

“Well, fix it!”

 

 

 

“That’s what we’re trying to do.”

 

 

 

“Everett—“

 

 

 

“This was supposed to _help_ him. He looks scared.”

 

 

 

“I know. But—“

 

 

 

“Dr. Rush, are you able to respond to us now?”

 

 

 

He  
He was  
He _was._  
He was the person they were talking to.  
He was the person they were talking to whose name was Nicholas Rush.

He blinked.  
He felt heavy.  
He felt drowsy.  
He felt drugged.  
His head hurt.

There was something attached to his head.  
There were two things attached to his head.  
He raised his hand to touch one.

“Oh— okay, no, it’s better if you leave those alone for right now.”

The person in the white coat was Dr. Carolyn Lam.  
She had handed him a gas mask and helped him to tighten the straps around his head.  
He knew several other things about her also.  
He did not know why she was preventing him from accessing the objects that were attached to his temples.

“Keep adjusting. He’s obviously aware of us— that’s a step in the right direction.”

Adjusting what?  
His head felt—  
Oh Christ his head was—

“Dr. Rush, do you know—“

Something was happening something was—

happening and he did not know the etiology of what was happening but if he were to proffer a hypothesis his hypothesis would involve the intersection of the coin-sized devices and his temples, because: (1) the proximity of the devices to his brain was suggestive; (2) the devices were slightly warm and this indicated a likelihood that they consumed and/or produced energy; (3) something had not been happening in his brain before the devices made an appearance and now that they had made an appearance something was happening in his brain, and what exactly was happening to his brain, he didn’t like it, but he lacked the context and lexicon to otherwise describe the experience, perhaps he could acquire a dictionary; he had a facility with dictionaries; he currently owned six dictionaries, two English, one Latin, one French, one Italian, one German, but they were stored in a box that was stored in a spare room in his flat, so he could not readily consult them, and really he would not describe them all as _his_ dictionaries, although he owned them; he had purchased the German and Latin dictionaries, as well as one of the English, but the others had originally belonged to Gloria, who was dead. Gloria was dead and this was confusing because he had been speaking with Gloria just a moment ago, or had it been just a moment ago, he had no way of verifying this, and it had not seemed odd to him at the time to be speaking with Gloria, but he suspected now that perhaps his thoughts had been disordered to an extent that was unusual even for him, for instance he had also thought that there were vines inside his body, and this was clearly not the case; he was the only thing inside his body although that was a Cartesian fallacy and perhaps if he’d had a dictionary then he would’ve chosen his words more carefully because he had a facility with dictionaries and when he was eleven his grammar school teacher had given him a dictionary that came in three volumes, A-J, K-S, and T-Z, with a special bit at the back of the third volume that listed commonly used phrases from foreign languages and gave you the translations, and he had never heard any of the commonly used phrases, some of which were quotations from Greek and Roman poets, exempli gratia (exempli gratia had been one of the phrases): πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει, that was Heraclitus, or rather what Plato said that Heraclitus had said, or _felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas_ , Happy is he who has been able to know the reasons for things, which Virgil had written in one of the Georgics, and eleven-year-old Rush had thought, Right, let’s give this a try then, but had it made him happy? Well it was a spectrum wasn’t it and anyhow he hadn’t known what “happy” meant. Perhaps he would’ve picked up a different phrase if his mum hadn’t nicked the dictionaries off him and sold them down the pawnbroker, but, well, that was what she did; cue: eleven-year-old Rush kicking up at the Mitchell Library skittish and sullen-shouldered in his denim jacket, and they didn’t let you take books out in those days, so the wee boy with his uncut hair and a voice that barely got above a whisper had to ask the librarian to fetch him the works of Virgil, and stay sat there under her eye as he tried to make sense of John Dryden’s _Aeneid_ until the library closed and he had to come back the next afternoon, but he _did_ come back, because fuck his mum and fuck John Dryden and fuck Virgil for writing in fucking Latin in the first place, fuck the library with its brass dome, taking him six goes to enter because it was the most splendid building he’d ever seen, fuck all of them, is what he was saying, and fuck Dr. Carolyn Lam who was holding his wrists in a tight grip and about whom he knew several things (1) that she was General Landry’s daughter, (2) that she had lied to him, (3) that she had handed him a gas mask and helped him to tighten the straps around his head, (4) that she had sequenced his genome, or rather three genes in particular, (1) ATA, which facilitated the activation of Ancient technology, (2) ATS, which allowed gene carriers to achieve low-level synchronization between their neural activity and said Ancient tech, (3) UAT, the nature and purpose of which were yet unknown, and perhaps that should be considered in any hypothesis that attempted to account for his situation in a hospital gown on a gurney in the Cheyenne Mountain infirmary, an infirmary situation on the twenty-first floor, which was a highly interesting number, twenty-one, 21, like the number of tones in the Ancient musical system if one did not include the ghost note, and was that important? Was it? It was probably important, 21 was 7x3, and

“—where you are?” Dr. Carolyn Lam finished.

“Yes,”he said

and that seemed to be the right answer because Dr. Carolyn Lam released his hands and everyone in the room emitted a hushed sound of relief and there were other people in the room and he had not taken that into account and perhaps it needed to be taken into account when it came to his hypothesis; the other people in the room were Dr. Daniel Jackson and a woman whom he did not know and Colonel Everett Young whom he _did_ know and fuck fuck fuck he did not want Colonel Everett Young to see him like this for a number of reason that were difficult to concatenate just now and Colonel Everett Young appeared extremely unhappy, frightened, anxious, in pain, and who was the person whom Rush did not know? Who was she and why was Colonel Everett Young unhappy? She was wearing a white coat and this suggested that she was a medical professional of some kind and that did seem to follow because he was currently located in an infirmary, the Cheyenne Mountain infirmary, twenty-one (21) (7x3) (21x1) floors down, but he should not assume she was a medical professional until he had confirmation, so perhaps he should pursue confirmation, or perhaps he should endeavour to discern why Colonel Everett Young was unhappy, or perhaps he should attempt to test various hypothesis concerning his presence in the Cheyenne Mountain infirmary, but he was not sure which of these three avenues to prioritise and so he was stymied for the moment

“Do you know why you’re here?” Dr. Carolyn Lam asked

which made him suspect that she wished to know his hypothesis and perhaps she was trying to trick him into committing himself to an incompletely tested answer or, _or_ , she herself had no hypothesis and hoped to lure him into revealing the avenue of research he was pursuing, with an eye to appropriating his data, possibly

so he said, “I suggest that you formulate your own hypothesis; mine’s proprietary,”

and that did _not_ seem to be the right answer or at least it made Colonel Everett Young more unhappy and that provided a data point, to wit that “right” did not seem compatible with “making Colonel Everett Young” unhappy, but complicated iterations were obviously involved because he suspected that this in and of itself was not _right_ ; i.e. “right” /= (“right” /= “making Colonel Everett Young unhappy”) and Wittgenstein would almost certainly have had something to say about this and perhaps the solution was to live alone on a Norwegian mountain, the idea was certainly attractive, but he did not know where his clothes were and that was certainly an obstacle to executing this solution and also he vaguely recalled that interstellar terrorists were attempting to abduct him and he was not sure if the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Norwegian krone was favorable or if it were possible to fly to Norway from Colorado Springs and too he would have to purchase a handsaw if he were going to build a cabin and he did not know the Norwegian word for _handsaw_ or indeed any words in Norwegian and this presented significant difficulties in terms of carrying out his plan

“You were suffering from abnormal neural activity,” Dr. Carolyn Lam said, speaking atypically slowly.“Basically an ongoing seizure. We sedated you to protect your brain, but now you have two oscillation-interference devices attached to your head.”

oscillation-interference device was an expression that consisted of three words that he had never encountered in proximity and so the only approach available to him was to attack them from an etymological angle outlining all of the possible meanings available to each of the words and considering which seemed to be the most plausible outcome so _oscillation_ was a movement between two points, from the Latin _oscillo_ , and an electronic oscillator was a type of oscillator and a Foucault’s pendulum was a type of oscillator and there were various types of quantum oscillator and sound was a type of oscillation, sound _waves_ , music, musical instruments, a vibrating string, an avenue of thought that made his head feel odd as though he were trying suddenly to remember a whole sentence that was on the tip of his tongue, so he considered _interference_ instead which looked on the surface like it ought to come from the common etymological root _fero_ , the Latin for _to carry_ , for instance something inter-carried, carried between two parts, but it did not come from that root at all, it came from _ferio_ which was _to strike_ and that was quite different, _interference_ was _to strike between_ , and it was interesting that the two words, _fero_ and _ferio_ , should be so similar; what did it suggest, what did it mean? How was carrying like striking? Well. He could think of a number of possible answers and also he could think of a number of possible ways that oscillation could strike a blow between two things or alternatively be subjected to such a blow but he could not seem to conjecture a situation in which these ways would apply to himself and so he said guardedly

“What the fuck is an oscillation-interference device?”

and _he_ was speaking atypically slowly also wasn’t he, and why was he speaking so slowly, was it because he was drugged? Was he drugged? He felt drugged and he felt as though there were a chance that his thinking was not entirely regular for instance when he attempted to recall how he had come to be unclothed and in the Cheyenne Mountain infirmary he felt very strange and it was difficult to access the memories as though they had not been encoded correctly and he did not like that he did not like that he could not access the memories because what was in the memories what had happened what had

Dr. Carolyn Lam said, “The devices generate an electromagnetic signature that destructively interferes with the abnormal neural activity that was causing you to—“she paused— “not think clearly. We’re still calibrating the signature, so it’s possible that you may feel a little strange.”

he felt a little strange he felt like parts of him were missing for instance his memories of arriving at the infirmary and also other things and if they had taken his memories then what else had they taken and were they _currently_ taking things away and what were they taking and why did Colonel Everett Young look so unhappy and what had _happened_ and _what were they taking away_ and _who was the woman typing on a computer in the corner_ and _what was she doing_ and _what had happened_ and _what were they taking away_ and surely rather than attempt to investigate an hypothesis that would account for his current situation he ought to _rip those fucking machines off his head_ so he wrenched his hands up and

“—Nope,”Colonel Everett Young said and Colonel Everett Young was— he was _holding Rush’s wrists down_ , it was unacceptable, the air in the room was thin and oxygen-poor and he could not breathe, and what if they had poisoned the air was that a possibility and he was underneath a mountain and what if the mountain simply collapsed or what if all the air was sucked out by means of some mechanical failure, it would certainly feel a lot like he could not breathe and he felt like he could not breathe and white flashed in his field of vision and he thought about the glowing of ionised air, an eerie and fragile blue light that was fatal or rather most often heralded the occurrence of fatal things, the release of particles, atomic transformations, a wave rippling or rather ripping outwards and effecting changes you could not see and _he_ could not see he was

“Alaniz—“

“I’m rebalancing the levels.”

“He’s panicking.”

“I can see that.”

“You need to keep holding him down.”

“I know.”

“If he—“

“I _know_ , okay?”

“Can’t you give him something?”

“We need him conscious for the calibration.”

“No,” he said,“No, no, no, _get off me_ , get the _fuck_ off me, no, no, _no!_ ”

“Nick, we’re trying to help you.”

but they were _not_ trying to help him they were _taking_ things they were _taking them away_ he could feel it like the _dictionary_ with its foreign phrases and its offer to explain them all to him but then it was gone and he was left to parse the meaning of _oscillation-interference_ and the plaintext of the cypher and every other fucking thing alone on the Gnossian shore, _Gnosia regna,_ the kingdom of knowledge, but they had _taken it away_ and now he would

“Nick. Nick, it’s okay. It’s okay. We’re _helping_ you.”

“No!”

“You’re okay. Look at me. Look at me, hotshot. You know me. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Did—

 

did he know this man?

He was fairly certain he knew this man.

He was certain he had known this man a few moments ago.

He had known this man’s name, the man with the haggard face and dark curls.

He had not meant to forget it; it was one of the things that he had lost. One of the things that had been taken away.

He— didn’t think that this man would have taken something from him, though he had no basis on which to make this judgement.

He didn’t think this man would hurt him.

This man whose name was Young.

“Young?” Rush said. The word came out shaky and uncertain.

Young shut his eyes. His eyelashes formed dark fringes against his tired face. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Yeah, it’s me. I’m not going to hurt you, okay? We’re trying to help you.”

Rush made a restless sound and flexed his wrists. Young was still holding him pinned to the gurney. “Why.” Words didn’t come for a moment. He pushed against Young’s grip again. “Why are you— this.”

“You can’t take off the interference— things, the buttons.”

“Why?”

“They’re the only thing stopping you from having a seizure that was going to cause damage to your brain.”

“No. I don’t want them. Take them off. I can’t think. Probably. Proprietarily. _Properly_. I can’t think properly.” Rush pushed his face against the pillow, fighting down a surge of panic that produced the pale aura of ionised light again.

“It’s going to get better,” Young said. His eyes were very intent and serious. “I promise. It’s already better than it was a couple of minutes ago, right?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s getting better. You just have to stick with me, okay? You’re not going to keep feeling like this. We’re going to get you back to normal. Or—“ he huffed a little laugh— “you know, as normal as you get.”

It was a feeble joke, delivered feebly; Young was clearly too exhausted to summon more. Rush wanted to manage a smile in response but couldn’t do it. “Okay,” he whispered.

“If I let you go, will you promise not to mess with the— things, the buttons?”

Rush nodded.

“Okay. Then let’s give this a try.” Cautiously, Young unclamped his hands from around Rush’s wrists. He hesitated for a moment before pulling back, and eyed Rush with concern.

Rush, hunching his shoulders, drew his arms up and hugged them across his chest. He was prepared to accept the explanation that the devices Young had described as “buttons” were helping him think in some fashion, and his thinking did seem to be growing clearer— Young was correct. However, he did not like hospitals and he did not like _this_ hospital this so-called infirmary with its emphasis on the _infirm_ , the weak and the wounded, and there were a number of reasons he did not like hospitals and when taken in toto they constituted a more than valid etiology for instance (1) he did not like to be unclothed and he did not understand why hospitals were so insistent upon taking your clothing unless they simply wished to reduce you to a body, make you a body, a wordless lump of bones and meat and skin, and (2) he did not like all of these medical devices that purported to expose the insides of him as though they knew anything about his insides, _anything_ , any more than they had when he was a child, as though attaching electrodes to his head—

“ _Fuck_ ,” he said shudderingly— breaking free, with some effort, of that reeling, delirious train of thought. “Will you stop— _doing_ that?”

The question was directed at the dark woman working on the computer. She glanced up at him, looking unrepentant. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m normalizing you. I know it probably makes you feel a little peculiar.”

“It makes me feel—“ Rush buried his face in his hands. No matter how extreme his cognitive disorder, he was unwilling to disclose to the varied personages present in this room the experience of being nothing more than an electromagnetic calibration produced by a stranger on a laptop who could adjust the interacting levels of his consciousness at her whim. She could make him clever or stupid, passive or violent. She could take away his speech. She could take away his memories. There _was_ no him, he thought with muted hysteria. He was everything and nothing. He was without fixed boundary, in the sea of darkness. He was a ship of Theseus that was not a ship. A ship dissolving in the water. A brief fluctuation, the mechanical illusion of consciousness, and now the machine was in someone else’s hands.

He could feel the twin devices under his fingertips. They were cool at the edges, with a pinprick center of heat.

“Hey,” Young said gently. When Rush lowered his hands and looked up, Young was sat in a chair very close to the bed. Young rested his arm against the bedclothes, the very edge of his little finger brushing Rush’s hand. “Don’t think about that stuff right now, okay? Even if you were thinking clearly, you still wouldn’t be thinking clearly. You’re tired, you’re scared, you’re hurt.”

“‘Don’t think about it,’” Rush repeated, meaning to infuse the words with sarcasm and mostly failing. His voice sounded very friable and thin. “‘Don’t think.’ Easy for you to say.”

Young smiled, a faint curve in his deeply worn face. “Yeah, yeah. I know. But I’ve been there. Sort of. It’s better to focus on the practicalities.”

“Yes?” Rush’s own little finger crept over Young’s and curled there, the smallest covetous gesture. He watched it do so with mixed feelings. “And what are the practicalities?”

Young looked over at Lam, who was watching them with a careful and difficult-to-interpret expression.

Lam cleared her throat. “As you may have gathered from the fact that Dr. Alaniz is currently adjusting the output of the devices, they can be accessed remotely. The transceiver that allows this can be disabled, but I’m reluctant to do so in case any… problems arise. You also may have gathered from the fact that the devices are— well, fundamentally they’re broadcasting; that’s what they _do_. So you may have gathered that they emit an electronic signature that’s externally detectable.”

Rush had not come to either of these conclusions. He shifted restlessly, conscious of deficiencies he couldn’t yet guess at— alterations somewhere in his underpinnings. He felt Young glance over at him and press their hands more tightly together.

“The range isn’t large,” Lam said. “Maybe ten or twelve klicks.”

“Ten or twelve _kilometres?”_ Rush said in disbelief.

“We’re working on some kind of shielding.”

“What you’re telling me is that you’ve put a great big fucking boron— cadmium— _fuck_ — xenon—“ Rush took a deep breath. He had to look away; he felt a kind of despair inside him that wanted expression, and he would not, _would not_ allow it to be expressed. “A great big fucking _neon_ sign on my head. An invitation to the Lucian Alliance.”

“They don’t know to look for it,” Lam said.

Rush laughed bitterly. “How sure are you of that?”

There was a long silence. Lam dropped her gaze. “Anyway,” she said at last. “You’ll be staying on base for now while we fine-tune the calibration and make sure you’re not experiencing any sequelae from the seizure. So it’s not a relevant point.”

“The bunker,” Rush said flatly.

“No,” Young cut in. “You’re not a prisoner.”

“No?”

“It’s only for a few days. And I’m going to stick with you as much as I can. You can hang out with Ginn if you want. I’ll bring you some books and stuff so you don’t get bored.”

“My computer?”

Young hesitated. “I don’t—“

Rush’s free hand clenched in the bedclothes. “I need to work on the cypher. I was _close;_ I almost had it.”

“Nick.” That was Jackson, whom Rush had not really perceived in the room. He was not perceiving things correctly and this was frustrating. He felt as though he were pushing against the inner walls of another room, a room that he was not inside of but that was instead inside of him, although he was also inside of it, and he was _trapped_ , and he could not see its exact dimensions, and became aware of its volume only when the air supply was exhausted. Jackson said, shifting to stand at the end of the gurney, “Working on the cypher was hurting you.”

“No,” Rush said.

“ _Yes._ Something that happened on your mission with Sheppard seems to have—“

“You’ve never wanted me to solve them.”

“That isn’t true,” Jackson said.

“It _is_ true.” Rush turned to Young. “Young— tell him. Tell him. I could solve it. I need my computer.”

Young met his gaze. It occurred to Rush that Young looked more tired than Rush had ever seen him. His chin was rough with dark stubble; his hair was in a state of multicircular disarray. “You need to stay alive first,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “I don’t know if you really—“ He paused, his eyes flickering closed for an instant. “Do you even remember what happened?”

“I—“ Rush attempted to access the memory. This was not a simple project. “I remember the piano. I cooked you dinner: the dancer. There are— I think there are pieces missing, or— they don’t seem to fit in the right places— I feel— “ He felt intensely sick. “How did I get here?”

“You came with me,” Young said. “You were hallucinating, so you were pretty out of it at the time. That was two days ago. You’ve been unconscious since then.”

Rush stared at him. “Two days?”

Young nodded jerkily. Just for a moment, something in his expression split and Rush glimpsed a depth of emotion there that he had not known Young possessed. Except: he _had_ known, he thought; of course he had known it. He had crept up to the edge of that water; he had gone so far as to dip his toe in, distrustful of any element that had the potential to drown him, yet unable to turn aside from the probably-fatal reservoir. There must be, he had thought, some means of elemental motion that he had learnt and forgotten, or had somehow managed never to learn. Why else was he always drowning? Other people came and went without knowing the terror of trying to keep one’s head above the surface, fighting for every hard and ragged breath. Perhaps he had thought that Young knew the secret. But now he thought that this was not the case, or that Young was engaged in a different kind of drowning. Perhaps Young was drowning in a different kind of lake.

Rush looked down. “I see,” he said.

“You scared us,” Young said. He was attempting to close up that split, but he couldn’t quite conceal it entirely. “So just—“ He let out a breath. “Just focus on being okay for now, all right? Just for a little while?”

Rush was staring at the place where their two fingers were entwined. In the back of his mind, a memory that he could not wholly access flowered. Flowered. Flowers. Entwined. Vines. It troubled him, but not for the usual reasons. It was like trying to recall something beautiful from a dream. There was a risk involved; things that were beautiful in dreams were not always beautiful in the real world. Still— one couldn’t help wanting to see.

Still— still—

He looked up at Young’s face, with its hint of hidden currents. He experienced a brief and powerful urge to touch it, to explore its weary crevasses with both his hands until he knew its geography intimately enough and so well that he could, if he wanted, traverse the landscape blindfolded. This was a ridiculous impulse, of course. There was no such knowledge; there was never a time when one could count oneself so safe, and if he had ever thought that there was, he had learnt that there was not, ten times over.

All the more stupid of him, then, to let Young’s warm and worried gaze overwhelm him, enfold him, draw him in, until he sighed and subsided onto the gurney.

“‘Focus on being okay,’“ he said crossly, mimicking the dreadful rumble of Young’s American accent. “Idiotic. Next you’ll expect me to practice medication— mediation— _meditation.”_ He tried to clench his hands in his hair and couldn’t, on account of the wires and electrodes. He made a muted and unintentionally plaintive noise of frustration. “Fuck.”

“Hey,” Young said quietly. The same stupid, rumbling accent. He always said that: _hey_. Monosyllabic and meaningless and soaked in comfort.

Rush shut his eyes. He felt that the word was not a word, but rather a very heavy and gentle stone that had settled on the centre of his chest and was pressing stillness into him in a way against which he did not feel compelled to offer resistance.

“Fuck you,” he said, sounding defeated even to himself. “Fine. If it makes you happy, I suppose that I can give it a go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rush quotes two poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "I am like a slip of comet" and "Moonrise June 19 1876," as well as Ronald Blythe's book _Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village_.


	32. Pen and Paper

Ginn inhales the scent of Tau’ri antiseptics, a smell like sterilized water that makes her feel safe and that is currently assisting her in the constraint of a significant amount of frustration.

“Refusing to answer the assigned questions does not produce an impression of intellectual superiority,” she says. “It produces the impression that you have the temperament of an anklebiter, which from the spatial point that I am occupying does not appear wholly untrue.”

Rush glares at her from where he is seated cross-legged atop one of the long slim SGC medical beds. When Ginn had first been permitted to visit him, the previous day, he had been clad in one of the paper coats that the Tau’ri make their casualties wear, but he had complained about it so much that more satisfactory clothing had been assembled for him: denim trousers and a t-shape shirt that is so large on his body as to almost qualify as a _kumiz_ , and a blazer that Colonel Young had been able to retrieve from his automobile because “you shed all over everything I own,” he’d said, “did you know that, you’re like a golden retriever or one of those fluffy Persian cats.” Rush had looked revolted. He had directed at Colonel Young an expression that was almost as venomous as the one that he is currently giving to her.

“Your failure to comprehend the nuances of register produces the impression that you have the mind of an American undergraduate,” he says. “To clarify, that isn’t a compliment.”

“I would like to meet one of these American undergraduates. I think they can’t be as objectionable as you depict them.”

“You would find them less objectionable than unfathomable, I suspect,” Rush says. Then, after a moment, he adjusts his glasses and adds, “That _is_ a compliment.”

“You are utilizing a new strategy to prevent me from asking you questions.”

Rush frowns and alters the orientation of his gaze floorward. This allows Ginn ample visual access to the silver devices fixed to his temples. Each one is no larger than a half- _pirut_ , and at its focal point is a fleck of something bluish-white and glowing. They are rather pretty machines, she thinks. They remind her of the artifacts that ring-people sell for scrip in the vending season, still covered in clay and dust from wherever they’ve been unearthed; just scrap-things, really, because anything of substance made by the First People has long ago been found and removed, and this is just what’s left. The remainders: a single earring or the casing of a console, a palm-sized piece of a circuit board, a few flat pieces of a colored crystal stronger than glass. Once Varro bought her a child’s toy carved from some species of resin, no longer than her little finger and shaped like a coiling fish. She had loved it, but Simeon had stepped on it to teach her a lesson. It had come apart under his heel into a thousand splinters, and she had not been able to put it together again, although for a long time she had tried at night, while the others in the compound were sleeping— splinter by splinter, using shipworker’s sealant, squinting through an ornamenter’s scope beside her little lamp.

“I don’t understand,” she says to Rush, who does not like that she can see the devices. She can tell by the way he shakes his head when he sees her looking, so that his hair falls forward and partly occludes her view of them. “This process is designed to help you. You object unceasingly to your current condition. Yet you resist allowing me to perform the slightest calibration.”

“I wasn’t allowed to assist in the development of the protocol. The questions they devised for it are absurd.”

“They’re not solely designed to measure your mental capacity,” Ginn points out.

Rush fixes her with a withering stare. “Yes, thanks. I _had_ worked out that _Describe your first three interactions with the Stargate program_ wasn’t a prompt that was going to push me to my intellectual limits.”

“I believe it is intended to test your facility of recall and ability to sequence memories.” In fact, this objective is enumerated in the protocol that she is reading from her computer screen.

“I had worked that out as well.”

“Clearly you are excelling in the area of abductive reasoning,” Ginn says gravely. “If you like, I will make a special note of it.”

Rush narrows his eyes, obviously suspecting that he is being laughed at.

Ginn adopts an innocent expression. She picks up her ink pen and her little book of blank white paper, with its smooth pleasant texture and its gray CLASSIFIED stamp. Writing by hand is not an art that she had had a plenitude of opportunities to practice before her current span of time on Earth. She would not know how to hand-write Goa’uld or Ancient. On Earth, however, there is such a superfluity of this substance, paper! And it is expected that every person will be able to mark out a message upon it. The Tau’ri have computers, even portable computers; her observations lead her to conclude that it would be perfectly possible for someone of their race to go from birth to death without finding it once necessary to utilize script, pen, or paper. Yet they venerate the act of writing, and one can scarcely travel anywhere within the Cheyenne Mountain complex without being offered a fresh surface of paper and a pen. She has taken to collecting them— all the the beautiful little mechanical pens and the sheets of paper, folded to fit in her pockets. Back in her cell, she practices writing in English. Her letterforms are clumsy, but she is improving them.

“ _Fine_ ,” Rush says at length, and folds his arms crossly. “First interaction with the fucking Stargate program: getting accosted by Daniel fucking Jackson on my own university campus, on my personal terrain, on my home turf. He attempted to sell me on this problem they were attempting to solve— a mysterious code they couldn’t find. I thought he was a lunatic, a judgment that has since been borne out. Second interaction: much the same, with the addition of Jackson blathering on about ancient aliens and interstellar travel. He attempted to verify his credentials; I told him I wasn’t interested.”

Ginn regards him curiously. “You were not interested?” she asks.

Rush’s eyes slide away. “I had a great deal on my mind at that particular moment.”

“What?”

“Excuse me?”

“What was sitting upon your mind?”

Rush picks at one of the bronze alloy buttons of his blazer. “It’s not relevant. Or, I don’t know, perhaps it is. How am I to know, after all? My brains have been poached. No. Hashed— _fuck_ —scrambled. Are being scrambled. Currently. _Currently_ ; that’s a pun; you ought to make a special note of _that_ one. I’d just been informed my wife was dying. That, a 2/2 courseload, and service obligations… so, you see, I’d got a lot on.”

Nothing about his affect alters as he’s speaking to suggest that any one sentence causes him more distress than the others. Ginn briefly considers the possibility that he is experiencing emotional inhibition; this is one area that she has been instructed to test. But upon a repeated act of cogitation, she thinks that his emotional inhibitions have not changed at all. This does not aid her in determining a response to his statement. “Oh,” she says at last.

“The third interaction,” Rush says, without pausing noticeably or raising his gaze to her, “was with David Telford. I don’t believe the two of you have met.”

Ginn shakes her head.

“David… was able to frame the situation in a way that was appealing.” A small, private smile twists his mouth into a diacritic. “Moreso than Jackson, at any rate.”

“What did he say?” Ginn asks.

Rush raises an eyebrow. “Is this a part of your little questionnaire?”

Ginn places the palm of her hand on her book of paper. She can feel the textural distinction where she has made little ink-marks, the place where the pen has pressed into the page. She says, “You don’t like that I am asking you questions.”

“I am indifferent to the apparently universal cooption of my acquaintances into the military-medical-industrial establishment.” Rush is still rolling one of the buttons between two fingers. It has sprouted a very thin blue fibrous thread.

Ginn feels wounded by this statement, even as her intellect rejects its truthfulness. “You are _not,”_ she says defiantly, as though her conviction can make it true. “You are _not_ indifferent.”

“No?” With an excess of deliberateness, Rush lifts his eyes to regard her as he delivers a savage yank to the thread. “Perhaps I wasn’t, and now I am. Perhaps I require further _recalibration._ Or perhaps I’m lying, and a little recalibration could be utilized to eliminate _that_.”

Ginn pushes the tips of her fingers hard against the paper. They ought, she thinks, to leave a mark like the ink. It is strange that the body is accorded such limited means of speaking. This seems like a significant deficiency— that one requires a substrate, an implement, an artificial set of rules and signals in which your interlocutor must also be trained. Even she, who can communicate effortlessly with half the galaxy via the translation matrix of the so-called “gate,” has often wished that, in a situation such as this one, she would find when she removed her hand from the page that she had left behind her an ineradicable print encoding her most convoluted emotions. It is a problem, otherwise, to try to program them in language. There does not always seem to be an applicable set of rules, an appropriately-sized constraint.

She does not voice this thought to Rush. Rather, she says somewhat hotly, “I am trying to aid you. As, indeed, a great many people are. I have no intention of— of _laundering your brain,_ and I do not think that the military-medical-industrious establishment does, or your casualty personnel would not have asked me to participate in the coding and calibration of your transmitters, subtracting the regard of how deft an Ancient programmer I may be.”

“No?” Rush says again. He crosses his arms over his chest and looks bad-tempered. “I don’t see why not. A fucking nest of crawling ambition and servility, convenient allegiances and covert agendas, that’s what this place is. It eats at you, like some sort of undiscriminating acid. You should avoid touching things. Surfaces. People. You’ll get it on you.”

“I was raised in the Lucian Alliance,” Ginn says flatly. She peers at her computer, and presses a key. An image pops up— the artistic rendering of a large and quite alarming quadruped. She turns the screen to face Rush. “Would you taxonomize this animal, please?”

“Fuck off.”

“There is a set of extremely complicated mathematical problems for you to solve if you successfully complete this task.”

Rush pulls his knees up close to his body, looking even more bad-tempered. “I’ve already done the mathematics, with Dr. Perry. It was the first thing I demanded that they check.”

“We are not checking your ability to do mathematics. We’re assessing the transitions from one mode of thinking to another. I would say that your insistence on sulking is invalidating the results, but at least we’ll obtain an accurate measure of your ability to transition from sulking to engaging in any other form of cognition.”

Rush narrows his eyes at her.

Ginn returns a look of placid competence.

“I preferred you when you were shooting at things,” Rush says.

“You did not. You shouted at me, and implied a number of offensive opinions. You said that I was a script child who lived underground. I have never lived underground, not in my whole life. For the most part, I have lived in space.”

Rush looks away, but not before the corner of his mouth turns upwards like the lifting graph of a cubic curve. “Yes, well.”

“We don’t have these animals in space—“ Ginn indicates the computer— “so I do, in fact, need you to inform me how it is called. I have the answer printed here, but I do not know how to pronounce it.”

“It’s an elephant,” Rush says. “A fucking elephant.”

Ginn nods solemnly. “I see.” She makes a note of this: the illogical English pronunciation. She has found that most English words come without any consistent rules governing how they are to be pronounced.

“May I have my maths problems now?” Rush asks in a long-suffering voice.

“Yes.” Ginn hands them over: several gleaming white rectangles of paper affixed to each other with a cunning little metal thread. She extends to Rush a pen from her own collection.

Rush accepts the paper and works in silence for a moment. The peak of his pen scratches busily, moving at a much greater rate than that at which Ginn can manage script. She can sense his satisfaction at having sufficient mental occupation, and wonders how much restlessness has contributed to his current uncharitability of temper. Colonel Young has specified that Rush is not allowed unsupervised access to a computer, but perhaps someone could bring him books. She does not know what sort of books Rush likes. She doesn’t even know if he likes the books that he had ordered for her. He had only said that they were the books she should read to become a person on Earth. He’d said they were the books she needed to read if she wished people on Earth to regard her seriously. She had never before approached the act of reading like this. She had thought that the books would contain rules that she was meant to memorize, but they did not. Or the rules were very skillfully concealed if they did. Perhaps when she has finished reading the books she will understand, she thinks.

“Ah,” Rush says aloud, staring at the paper. His brow is furrowed. He is biting his lip. “This word is—“

Ginn taps the trail-button on her computer and pulls up the program that contains the code for Rush’s transmitters. “Yes?”

He hesitates, obviously reluctant to display the paper to her. “Annealing,” he says. “Anneal. Annul. Annoy. _Anno_ fucking _mirabilis_. I can’t—“

His voice catches, and she perceives the instant at which he is on the cusp of destroying the paper. The hands in which he holds it have already begun to clench into fists when she reaches out and rests her own firm hand on the finely woven cloth of his sleeve.

“I will correct the error,” she says. “Allow me a moment.”

The Lanteans who first coded the crystals that power the transmitters ornamenting Rush’s head had utilized an Ancient programming language to ensure reduced penetrability by outside hackers. In this galaxy, its grammar is not widely known, and indeed Ginn is only familiar with this language because Rush has instructed her in its use since her arrival, persisting in the peculiar charade that she is one of his script child students, his assistant, rather than a prisoner and a not-quite-Earth-person.

She finds the Ancient code elegant— its horizontal and its vertical columns, its stylish, unwritable letters. It is quite consistent with the artistry of their mechanics and their maths. Very quickly, she is able to make an alteration in the electromagnetic interference being transmitted, minutely adjusting the waveform of one of its multiple interacting currents. There is no one current that accounts for Rush’s exemplary verbal dextrousness; there is no one current that accounts for anything. He insists on characterizing himself as a deterministic program captured in the code that the Lanteans wrote, but he must apprehend that this is incorrect. The electrical collisions in his brain are microscopic and elusive. They emerge from chaos like the unlikely dinosaur life that Dr. Ian Malcolm predicted. Rush would require no further calibration if he were not, at root, a mystery.

“Annealing,” she says, glancing up.

Rush sighs and pushes his hair back from his face. “Yes, yes. I’m quite capable of approximating a global optimum.”

“I do not doubt it.”

Ginn watches him work for another while.

“It is not irregular,” she says eventually, without having wholly anticipated the utterance.

Rush says distractedly, “What?”

“It isn’t irregular. Your fear.”

He doesn’t look at her, but his mouth tightens. “I shudder to think how you have reached the erroneous conclusion that I am, for some reason, afraid.”

“The Lucian Alliance has the capacity to override the will of a person. We— They use it infrequently, because it can cause mental perturbations. But it is possible. So many people fear it. And the Goa’uld, where they did not simply take hosts, possessed machines to rewrite the code of the self. But beyond this, you know, I think—“ She stops. “I have often pondered upon my own self, in one way and another. The life I have lived is so extremely divergent from the one I once believed allotted to me. I do not think I am optimally designed for farmwifing. So for many drive-cycles I saw myself as— as perfused with luck. Fortunate. I am the artist of escaping. Your books use this expression. But it transpired that I wasn’t optimally designed for soldiery, either. So then I thought of the farmwife. I thought of her as though her trajectory were very classical and unaltered, while I had been set off course. I thought— perhaps there is a way to go back. A way to un-be. Then I could find this realer person.”

It is difficult for her to interpret Rush’s expression. He says, “But it doesn’t work like that.”

Ginn shrugs. “Perhaps it does. I don’t know. I can never seem to uncover the right kind of operations to perform. I don’t know how the farmwife Ginn would behave; I don’t know how to become her. I ought to know. Don’t you think? But she is— off in the dark of space somewhere, and I cannot see her. I suppose she has never killed a man. I suppose she might have saved Varro. But she would not have known Varro. She would not have known a great many things.”

Rush shakes his head. “You’re discussing something that differs entirely from my situation.”

“I considered the possibility that I might have been chemically reprogrammed,” Ginn says steadily, without acknowledging his protest. “I would not remember, so it could not be categorically excluded. It seemed in many ways a more acceptable solution. But I could not produce a rationale for this superiority. There had occurred an alteration. It ought not to matter how it was inflicted.”

Rush darts a glance at her and then returns his gaze to the paper. “Do you still wonder?”

“Dr. Lam performed a blood examination on me. I received the results yesterday. I have not been chemically influenced.”

“And are you disappointed?”

Ginn shakes her head. Her red hair comes tumbling down on either side of her face. She has been considering what to do about it— about her hair. Kiva had been very concerned about appearances, and under her command Ginn had brushed her hair sleek and lush and glowing every day. But her cell does not have a mirror, and there has been no cause to contemplate her appearance, since the soldiers and scientists she encounters do not seem to care. But now— “The opportunity to leave the base was contingent upon my successful examination. Colonel Carter says that tomorrow I may take a military escort and visit the city of Colorado Springs.”

Her statement startles a laugh from Rush. “I’m afraid you’re in for a very grave disappointment. It barely qualifies as a city.”

“I have been told that it offers many sites at which one may consume traditional American food.”

“It certainly offers many sites at which one may consume something purporting to be food.”

“I am going to enjoy myself,” Ginn says stubbornly, lifting her chin up. “I have decided.”

“Oh, well, if you’ve _decided.”_ Rush’s face is still transfigured by the faintest of smiles.

Ginn considers the comparative pro-cons of allowing the conversation to rest there. It pleases her to see Rush smile. For the past two days, he has been so ill: taut-faced and sunless-skinned and exhausted, alternately irritable or falling asleep, and wretched with his inability to perform unenumerated tasks that he feels are requisite for some reason that Ginn is not privy to. He has never been a wholly contented person, though she is not certain that she would recognize how “wholly contented” looks. No one in the Lucian Alliance is wholly contented, and it seems precious few on Earth. Still, she has a vague sense that a person ought to be contented. _Rush_ ought to be contented. He ought to be more contented than he is.

Not-with-this-standing, she says, “If I had been chemically influenced, your casualty officers would have helped me. It would have been necessary for me to stay underneath this mountain for a greater length of time. Perhaps they would not have corrected my memories. Perhaps they might have. If they did, I do not think I would be healed. Do you think you would be healed?”

Rush is silent for a long span of time. “Do I think I would be healed if…?”

He is engaged in evasion. Ginn says, “If they corrected your neural activity. Would it erase what has befallen you?”

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple.”

“No,” Ginn says. 

Rush falls silent again. With his pen, he sketches something on the topmost slice of paper. It is a very small, very perfect drawing of a fountain. “May I tell you something?” he finally says.

Ginn does not know how to respond to such a question. “Yes, of course,” she says uncertainly.

“I suspect I despise people who lack the capacity to go inside their bodies, who have no fortified place that they have made into which opposing forces are unable to enter. The hand that wants to batter against you, to dig its thumbs into your clay, can’t get in; and nothing else can, either. It’s how you hold out, how you remain a nation, self-governing, without the risk that you might… decohere. In that space you know at least that what you have suffered, you have chosen to suffer, because it’s a part of you, that suffering. You know this because it’s in the room.”

“Yes,” Ginn says. She finds the idea comprehensible, extremely.

Rush continues to stare at the tiny fountain. He is pressing absently against the paper with the tip of his pen. “Axiom in this exercise is the understanding that there is a you inside the box; that all the parts of you _already_ cohere; that you aren’t so plastic and insubstantial that a stray electromagnetic wavelength can—“ He sucks in a breath. “And that no nucleotide will rise up and make its own alterations, something that was always within you, that you can’t divorce from everything you had thought that you were protecting. It isn’t that I can’t be fucking healed; it’s that there’s nothing to heal, there’s nothing, do you understand? If there isn’t something in that box, there’s nothing. There’s nothing; there’s no _box_. It’s all just triggered fucking impulses in a fucking body that I have always, _always_ wished I didn’t have, and if I could _just_ be a body then perhaps I wouldn’t mind it, a deep sea animal with distributed cognition, and if I were exclusively electric than perhaps I’d be safe, because there would be nothing to touch, and that’s the difficulty, isn’t it? The _touching_. But this in-betweenness is insupportable; it’s fucking excruciating. Fuck. _Fuck._ ”

Without any prior warning, he pitches the paper across the room. The pen he retains, for some reason, clutched in his not-wholly-steady hand.

Ginn rises silently following the elapse of a moment, and goes to collect the paper from the floor. She arranges it so that its rectangles are once more aligned correctly, and the topmost slice shows the neat metal pin. She places it beside her laptop at a very exact distance and sits and folds her hands in her lap.

Rush has allowed his head to drop back against his pillow and is currently facing away from her. “I hadn’t meant to say most of that,” he informs the opposite side of the infirmary tiredly. “Perhaps you should re-adjust the electromagnetic signature.”

Ginn says evenly, “I could. I could readjust it each time you find your behavior less than optimal. But I anticipate, as I’m sure you do also, that this would only cause you further distress.”

“Yes,” Rush says dully. He is still holding the pen.

Ginn does not know how to speak to him. He has frightened her— not with his sudden trivial violence, but with the idea he presents. The examples she had offered had been very small ones, she thinks. She had misunderstood the scope of his concerns. Or perhaps she has never felt that there is much of a _her_ to start with. So it had not mattered so much and so fiercely to her, all the actual and potential reshapings. What is the head-laundered Ginn to her? Not so different from herself. She has not even any preferred foodstuffs. This is of great alarm to Colonel Carter, who continues to insist that Ginn taste every commissary item on offer and articulate some opinion of it. It is a practice that causes Ginn to feel helpless. She fears she doesn’t possess the the basic instinct of desire that Colonel Carter seems to expect. This is a skill that she has failed at acquiring. She likes the look of food; is fascinated by its texture, by how many different varieties the Tau’ri have. But though she is laboring diligently at the practice, she is not yet enough of a person to have preferred foodstuffs.

Rush has strong preferences about almost every aspect of his existence. Probably this is proportional to the degree that he is a person, and his fear that he may suddenly discover he is not one, or that to be one means something very different from what he had thought it meant.

She is envious, and she is not envious.

She thinks about the resin toy that Varro gave her, the glowing shards of it in the palm of her hand. She does not know why such a thought should come to her now.

“I’m sorry,” she says to the curve of Rush’s back. “I should not have tried to practice rhetoric upon you. I have upset you.”

Rush sighs, and turns back towards her. “No.”

“Yes.”

“It’s the tests. It isn’t you.”

“You do not like taxonomizing animals.”

“I object to being treated like one.”

“A lab rabbit,” Ginn says.

“A lab rat. Yes. In my own little maze.”

“Perhaps you could come with me to Colorado Springs?” she hazards. “Tomorrow?”

Rush shakes his head restlessly. “I’m not allowed off the base. Imagine that: I’m the prisoner, now, and you’re not.”

“I will bring you pizza. Or another delicacy you like.”

His mouth twitches in a very small fraction of a smile. “Whatever you find most topologically appealing.”

Ginn returns a smile of equal arc length. “The negotiation is concluded. The deal is complete.”

“Christ, there’s not some Lucian Alliance ritual for that, is there? Does it involve extensive torture?”

Ginn says, grave-faced, “It involves taxonomizing further animals.”

Rush casts his eyes up to the ceiling. He says, “Torture enough to qualify for the name.”

“We will arrive at poetry in a moment, and you will enjoy that better.”

“Marginally,” Rush says with crisp disdain.

“You like words.”

She had not expected this to silence Rush. But, very surprisingly, it does. He appears lost in thought. “Words offer false promises,” he says. “—That if we’re skilled enough at their usage, we may someday find that we have communicated something out of the immitigable loneliness of ourselves. I’ll save you the trouble: it doesn’t happen. The human condition is one of ink fucking spilt into an endless fucking chasm.”

Ginn thinks of herself pressing her fingers to the paper, trying to make a mark. But she cannot make a mark with her fingertips. She has only the option of stubbornly, deliberately scraping out the neat foreign lines of words. When one has only one option, one must pursue it. That is strategic. One cannot always understand the probabilities that may yet lead to successful fortune. The future is not underneath one’s command.

“Well,” she says determinedly, “although that may be so, we are only human, so please oblige me in contributing one more vocabularic unit to the chasm, and taxonomizing this animal.”

She opens an image file of an enormous fish with a sour mouth and extensive whiskers, and turns the computer to face Rush. For a moment, she catches his gaze as she does so, and something passes between them, brief and touched with sadness, that she thinks— for all the doubtful feasibility of such a communication— is wholly shared, and beyond words.


	33. Chapter 33

Following another long and fruitless meeting with what was, effectively, the members of Committee #6— minus Telford and subbing in Alaniz, plus every Ancient technology expert on Earth— Young slept for about an hour on one of the cots in the bunk rooms and woke up feeling unrested. He couldn’t remember what he’d dreamed about, but he felt like it hadn’t been good.

His mouth was like cotton, so he grabbed a disposable toothbrush and headed for the bathroom, where he could also splash some water on his face. When he caught sight of himself in the mirror he was strangely startled, as though the person he saw there wasn’t the one he had expected to see. But it had been a long couple of days, and he was running on adrenaline and nerve-ends. He was amazed he wasn’t seeing spiders. So he shook it off and washed himself up. Maybe, he thought, he just wasn’t used to the visible boot-stamp of his exhaustion. It got worse as you got older, the same tiredness walking over you again and again until the marks of it were like those human footprints people found in soft rocks by the ocean— something that could last for a million years.

When he’d pulled on a clean shirt, he headed up to the infirmary, and walked in on Ginn communing with Rush. Or maybe not communing, exactly, though communing was what they usually did; Rush looked pretty fed up, headed for an imminent explosion, and Ginn had the expression of someone who’d been subjected to just a little bit more Rush than she’d really bargained for. She’d been working on the calibration, Young saw, judging by the computer. Jackson had recommended bringing her in on the grounds that she was more proficient in Ancient computer code than anyone on Earth except Rush.

“Hey,” Young said, crossing the room and taking up a leaning position against the wall opposite Rush’s gurney. “How are you doing?”

Rush darted a disdainful glance at him. “Where the fuck are your crutches?”

“Uh,” Young said, unprepared for the question. “You know where they are. I left them at home when I was trying to rush you here.”

“That was nearly four days ago.”

“Correct,” Young said. “You know, I thought the point of this whole brainwave thing was to make you more you, not to make you more normal. You _definitely_ never used to know what day it was.”

Rush ignored the gibe. “You still haven’t been home?”

“Nope. Busy.” Young didn’t voice the underlying reason that even he wasn’t too stupid to know about: he didn’t _want_ to go home; had been deliberately avoiding it. This wasn’t the kind of crisis where you couldn’t leave the base for a second. He could’ve taken an hour to go get a change of clothes, instead of relying on the base’s generic BDUs. But it made him nervous, the idea of stepping out into the sunshine and leaving Rush buried under the earth, even thought he knew that wasn’t how it worked, that he was being dramatic. He wouldn’t be abandoning Rush in some underworld. But he was just so tired, and the thought had hooked itself into his shoulders, like a dark creature he was carrying around on his back. “Like you,” he added, steering the conversation away from his personal choices. “Busy getting intelligence-tested.”

Rush shot him an even more disdainful look. “Yes. My intelligence can most accurately be measured by requiring me to name a set of animals that every kindergartener knows.”

“ _I_ did not know them,” Ginn said mildly. Then, raising her eyes, to Young: “He is angry because he is not permitted to smoke cigarettes on the base.”

“Incorrect,” Rush said acerbically. “I am _annoyed_ at being policed like a criminal or said fucking zooscient kindergartener.”

“You know,” Young offered, “you could always use it as a chance to quit.”

Rush stared at him for a long moment, incredulously, and then turned so that he was deliberately facing away from Young. “Resume the evaluation,” he instructed Ginn curtly.

Young said, “I’m just saying.”

“I have received clearance to exit the Mountain and eat American food,” Ginn informed Young. “Tomorrow.”

“Uh—“ Young said, not sure why she felt the need to share this. “Great?”

“He is also angry about this, because I will be able to smoke cigarettes if I like, while he cannot.”

“Can we please _resume the fucking evaluation?_ ” Rush demanded, his voice turning loud.

“I don’t intend to smoke cigarettes, however,” Ginn said. “The _Stars and Stripes_ periodical informs me that they are toxic. Tobacco use is a health and financial burden upon military family units.” She keyed something into her laptop and squinted uncertainly at it. “Sop— Sop-ho-culls—"

"Sophocles," Rush snapped.

"Sophocles," she repeated. "Sophocles long ago heard it on the Age-ee-an—"

"Aegean."

Ginn allowed a short, frustrated sigh to escape. "And it brought into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.”

Rush frowned, his head tilted forwards so that the alien hardware was concealed by his long hair. “We find also in the sound a thought," he said tensely. "Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The Sea of Faith was once too at the full, and round Earth’s shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.”

“Rush,” Young said.

Rush continued loudly as though he hadn’t heard. “But now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night-wind—“

“Come on,” Young said. “I’m not allowed to talk to you now?”

“Down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world,” Rush announced, obviously relishing the grim and portentous note. “Matthew Arnold. ‘Dover Beach.’ Deliciously cheery, don’t you think? ’We are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.’ _Ignorant armies_ ; there’s exquisite redundancy for you.”

Young sighed and pressed his thumb against the arch of an eyebrow, forestalling a headache. “Yeah,” he said. “Yup. Exquisite redundancy. Right.” He could see pretty clearly what was going on here. “Hey, Lucian Alliance,” he said, giving his head a quick nod in Ginn’s direction. “You mind giving us a second?”

Ginn made an expressive face that communicated just how much she didn’t mind. “This is an acceptable point at which to pause the evaluation,” she said. She closed her laptop quickly and stacked papers, notebooks, and a pen case on top of it, from biggest to smallest, in a perfect pyramid. The precision seemed to please her; she scooped up the whole stack carefully and hugged it close to her chest as she stood. “I will return tomorrow,” she told Rush. “There are spatial awareness and artistic portions of the test that we have yet to complete.”

“I can’t tell you how I’m looking forward to it,” Rush said in a flat voice.

Ginn didn’t seem to take offense. “If you sleep,” she said, pausing at the door, “you will find your situation significantly more tolerable. It is scientific. I read an article about it in the Reader’s Digest. And perhaps if you are more polite, Colonel Young will escort you to the surface for a cigarette.”

When she had gone, Rush threw a resentful look after her. “ _Sleep_ ,” he said disgustedly. “All I do is fucking sleep. I’m like Epimenides, stuck under Mount fucking Ida. I’ll get the fuck out of here to find fifty years have passed. Not that it’d make any difference, in Colorado Springs.”

He’d slept a lot right after they’d gotten the buttons on him, in between calibration sessions. Lam said it was because the seizure he’d been having was metabolically expensive, and that sleeping would help him recover.

“So sleep for fifty years,” Young said, with a tiny shrug. “That sound great. It sounds like heaven. What, are you worried about all the pop music you’re going to miss?”

Rush scowled at him, crossing his arms in a way that managed to be both aggressive and defensive. “I’m a very important person, you realize,” he said. “Unlike yourself.”

“Yeah,” Young said. “I know. You’re still allowed to take some time off.”

“Take time off from what? From being me?”

And that, while a little less elaborate than Rush’s usual way of speaking, was pretty much peerlessly Rush-like in the way it shut Young down by laying bare something that Young didn’t really want to see.

Young sighed again and let his head drop back against the wall. “Well,” he said, “at least you’re feeling more like yourself.”

Rush’s mouth tightened. “You do excel at choosing the most extraordinarily uncomfortable turns of phrase. Yes. I am ‘like’ myself. Have you come to get me out of here? I’m amenable to an illicit heist-style escape.”

In spite of himself, Young felt his mouth twitch briefly upwards. “Sort of. Not off the base. But I got you a room with a real bed.”

“A cell.”

“No; a _room_. One of the ones we use to host people on base when they’re, you know, being hunted by assassins, or they’re accidental clones we don’t know what to do with yet.”

Rush refused to be sidetracked. “Does the door lock from the outside?”

“It locks from the inside, too,” Young pointed out. “There’s no surveillance cameras or anything.”

“A brief respite from the indignities of my lab-rat existence.”

And that was— not really what Young had wanted, obviously, to hear from him. Sounding defeated even to himself, he said, “Yeah. Basically. It’s the best I can do right know. I know, I know: fuck me.”

Rush looked angrily away. The dishwater-dark hair that he was always scraping out of his face fell to the side for a second, exposing one of the little silver machines and its speck of crystal. He didn’t say anything. Finally he made a sweeping, imperious gesture.

“Sorry, you’ll have to tell me what that means. I don’t speak Your Royal Highness’s language,” Young said.

Rush looked like he wanted to hit something. But instead he said in a tightly controlled voice, “Fine. Take me to the fucking cell, then.”

* * *

Rush had seemed pretty much normal to Young since the first day after he woke up, when he’d done a bunch of math problems with Amanda Perry, had a chat with Jackson in a couple of languages, taken a very bad-tempered nap, woken up to eat a sulky brunch, taken an even more bad-tempered nap, yelled at Young about wanting his computer, thrown a cup of water at a medic, and then almost immediately fallen asleep again. Ginn had come to visit him later that evening, and Rush had complained to her for a solid half an hour about all the ways he was being abused by Stargate Medical, starting with being denied his own clothing and finishing with a thorough review of their culinary sins. Young had thought— there you go, 100% Rush. But Rush himself hadn’t seemed to share that opinion. The more normal he seemed, the more angry and unsettled he seemed to get. Admittedly, nine out of ten people would’ve pegged _angry_ and _unsettled_ as fair descriptions of Rush’s usual behavior. But Young didn’t buy it. Rush wasn’t angry, he thought. Rush was— he didn’t know what Rush was. Something that had the same hard-to-get-hold-of, hand-slicing edges as anger, but was totally different underneath.

Mostly what it did— the anger that wasn’t anger, Rush’s inability to settle in his skin— was bring home to Young that inside of Rush was some depth that was way beyond him, something he’d never be able to touch. He’d known that on an intellectual level: Rush was a genius and Young… wasn’t. But you made assumptions about people, formed models of them based on the only knowledge you had about how people worked. It was easy for him to forget and think thatRush was the same shape as him inside. But Rush wasn’t. Young didn’t know how that made him feel. How were you supposed to ever really know someone when they didn’t have the same kind of component parts? At the same time, maybe that was part of the appeal— the whole project of trying to figure out how someone managed to be a person, to feel the same things, presumably, that you felt, to feel things you didn’t understand but wanted to or thought you might sometimes feel without understanding, as much as you could feel them in your own different kind of shape.

“Does it hurt?” he’d asked Rush at one point, trying to figure out why Rush seemed so upset about the buttons. Rush seemed like a guy who didn’t let you know when he was in pain. And maybe, for all Young knew, the best way to think about it was that Rush was hurting in a limb that Young didn’t have.

But Rush had looked down at where his fingers were moving restless and unpatterned against the blanket. “No,” he’d said. “It doesn’t hurt.”

* * *

The room they’d put Rush in was one of the nicer ones the base had— which, Young had to admit, wasn’t saying much. Standing there looking at it, he wondered whose job it was to buy the large peach lamp on the minuscule nightstand or the stiff white comforter on the bed; the faux-wood desk in the corner, the neat little set of notepad, pen, and Colorado Springs tourist brochure on top of it, or its mismatched schoolroom plastic-and-metal chair. The whole thing looked like a bad imitation of a hotel room, one of the really anonymous ones that made a point of offering you the same bleak set of furniture no matter where in the world you were.

“Well,” he said a little helplessly, "maybe you won’t complain about my couch so much when we get back.”

He’d thought that Rush would snap back with something snide and a little bit insulting, maybe: _On the contrary, I think we’ve found the room your couch belongs in_ or _You underestimate my ability to complain_. But Rush didn’t.

His jaw worked. He was staring at the plasticky pastel lamp base. Back in the infirmary, he’d been holding a cheap ballpoint pen in his hand, and Young saw that he still had the pen— that his fist was clenched around it. Young had a single instant of presentiment before the casing of the pen snapped, and then Rush was holding two potential projectiles instead of one, and then he was holding no potential projectiles, because he’d helped them actualize their potential by hurling them violently against the cinderblock wall.

“Right,” Young said, weary but unruffled. He’d gotten used to Rush destroying things. “Okay. I get it. One star on Yelp.”

When he turned to look at Rush, though, he saw that he’d underestimated the situation, or maybe just misunderstood it again. Rush’s fists were still clenched and he was breathing hard. He wasn’t looking at Young. He didn’t seem aware that Young was in the room. He was, Young thought, about three seconds away from trying to put one of those fists through a wall, which was going to end badly.

“Hey,” Young said in a different tone. “Come here. C’mere.”

He touched Rush’s shoulder. Rush shoved at him as though by instinct, like that was his default startle response, and then stared at him for a second, wild- and blank-eyed, and did it again. A third time. He kept shoving.

Young let himself be driven backwards with the ineffectual force of the blunt little jabs, absorbing them with hardly any effort, till he was up against the wall and there was nowhere else for him to go, no farther that Rush could possibly push him. Rush kept trying, of course: driving the palms of his hands into the muscle under Young’s collarbone, and then, when that didn’t work, pressing clenched fists into the same spot, like he was hitting Young in slow motion. He was standing close to Young— he’d let his head drop at some point, and it was practically resting on Young’s shoulder, so it wasn’t hard for Young to reach out carefully and draw him in, collapsing him against his chest with one steady arm around him.

Rush’s breath panted hot and damp against his shirt. Young brought his other hand up to comb through Rush’s hair. “Shh,” he whispered.

Rush made a muffled, harsh, painful, scraping-at-the-walls sound.

“I know,” Young said, and rested his chin on the top of Rush’s head. “I know. Shh.”

It took a long time for Rush to settle. For a while, Young could feel him still curling and uncurling his fists. Finally the motion slowed; the steady pressure against Young’s sternum relaxed.

Rush didn’t look up. But he said in a low, subdued voice, “ “You’ll wear your fucking hip out.”

“It’s mostly okay for now. In a minute I should sit.”

Actually, Young had been feeling the cumulative effects of no sleep and too much time spent walking the Mountain’s hallways, going from meeting to meeting or down to the infirmary and back up or just looking for a private place to sit and breathe. But the pain wasn’t worse like this than it had been when he wasn’t holding Rush. And it was a complicated thing, pain. It shouldn’t have made a difference to him that he could feel Rush’s hair tickling his mouth when he lowered his face and pressed it to the top of Rush’s head; it shouldn’t have made a difference that Rush smelled a little bit familiar in a way that Young associated with his couch and his kitchen and— weirdly, given how much trouble Rush caused in general— the sensation of rest. None of that affected pain, the path it carved from the nerves of the hip to the brain centers. But because being a human body was messy and fucked-up, Young still felt like it did.

Still, after a while he shepherded Rush over to the too-white, starchy, queen-size bed. Rush went passively, offering no resistance. Young pushed the pillows up against the wall and sat with his back against them; Rush, to Young's mild surprise, lay on the bed with his head in Young’s lap. There was something energyless in his posture. Young stroked his hair carefully back from his face, careful not to touch the little silver transmitter on his temple.

“They put me in mazes,” Rush whispered, “and expect me to find my way out of them. I _am_ a lab rat. I don’t even know what’s waiting at the end.”

Young didn’t ask who _they_ were. He wondered if Rush even knew, or if it was more of a general statement. He didn’t say anything, just kept running his fingers through Rush’s fine and somewhat tangled hair.

“When I was—“ Rush raised a limp hand, and dropped it. “I could see her. My—“ He swallowed. “My wife.”

“I know,” Young said. His throat ached.

"She's dead."

"I know," Young said again, almost inaudibly.

“It wasn’t her, not exactly, but it was something _like_ her. _So_ like her. Perhaps partly her. And now she’s gone again.”

Young rested a hand against the side of his face. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I don’t know what it _means_. How much of it is just dead ends and fractals— scientists you can’t see making notes they won’t ever show you, fucking shock collars you can’t ever take off?” Rush shifted, pressing his face against Young’s thigh and wrapping a loose arm around his kneecaps. “I’m so fucking— I just want to—Would I have told you this _before?_ Would I? Or is it all just an electrical alteration?”

“I don’t know,” Young said in a low voice. “I don’t know if anybody really knows that kind of thing.”

“No?”

“You’ve never been lying on a bed with me in the middle of an Air Force installation after a multi-day seizure we had to break you out of with untested Ancient tech, so— no, I don’t know what you would’ve said to me in that situation. I mean—“ Young frowned. “If you think about it, that situation couldn’t exist. Right? The only you who’d be lying on an Air Force bed with me after a multi-day seizure, wearing all that Ancient tech, is the you who’s here now, saying what you’re saying. So I guess that sort of settles it.”

“Does it,” Rush said.

“Doesn’t it?”

Rush said, in a tense voice, “Apparently.”

Young let the silence spread. "You don't have to do that," he at last.

Rush said flatly, "What?"

"'Apparently.' You can tell me if something's bothering you. You can tell me."

“And how would you utilize that information?”

Young sighed and smoothed his hand down Rush’s arm. He let another long stretch of time elapse.

“You know, when you’re fighting with someone,” he said finally, “even if you’re just sparring, you’ve gotta treat every part of your body like a place a knife could go. You’ve got to think about it all the time— what if they go for your throat, how strong is your balance, left flank, right flank, left arm, right arm. It’s hard. It’s like spinning plates, and if you don’t keep them spinning— if you get too comfortable for a second, if you don’t stay concentrated on surviving _all the time_ — then you’re done for. But nobody can live like that in real life. It’s exhausting. I’ve never slept as hard as crashing after a battle. It’s just— humans weren’t made to have to do that, keep track of every finger and rib and elbow like if they don’t someone’s going to sink a knife into it.”

Rush didn’t say anything.

“Anyway,” Young said. “That’s just a tip about fighting, I guess.”

Rush’s arm tightened around Young’s legs for a moment. “I know how to fight,” he said.

* * *

Young stayed till Rush fell asleep like that, with his head still resting in Young’s lap, then carefully shifted Rush off him onto the bed. In the laminate dresser shoved in the corner, he found a navy wool USAF-issue blanket and shook it out to drape over Rush. Rush frowned and stirred, mumbling something under his breath.

“Go to sleep,” Young told him.

“ _You_ go to sleep,” Rush said, sounding dissatisfied. He scrubbed at his face, shoving his glasses half-off, made a snorting sound, and was out like a light.

Young retrieved the glasses carefully and folded them on the nightstand. He stood watching Rush for a second, fondness running through him like a physical warmth. Maybe it didn’t matter if he understood Rush, he thought. Maybe all that mattered was that he wanted to be the one Rush pushed and pushed against till he was done pushing, the one who knew how not to get hurt by it and how to hold Rush when he finally hit the wall. He thought he wanted to do that. He didn’t know what it meant. He’d never had to think about it with anyone before. He’d just— fucked people because he’d wanted them, or not because he’d wanted them, exactly, but because he’d thought that he _would_ want them, any minute, when something inside him finally grew up. It’d never been practical and to-the-point: this is what I want to do, this is what I want no one else to do for you, this is how I want to live.

He rubbed his brow exhaustedly. Rush had been right. He should go to sleep, not just catnap on cots with a terrible sense of looming catastrophe.

He started to leave, then turned back In a jerky motion, he leaned forward and very awkwardly touched Rush’s forehead with his lips. He’d been wanting to do it, to kiss Rush again. He hadn't known how to do it. 

On his way out, he switched the lamp on and turned the overhead light off. The room was filled with softer shadows; the color of it changed. It didn’t look so stark or so military. Young didn’t think that would matter to Rush. But it mattered to him. He wanted to make at least one thing better. That was always how he had worked. One step at a time. Slow, methodical. Doggedly fixing the small, inconsequential things he could.

* * *

Once he’d gotten a guard set up for the hallway where Rush was staying, he should’ve just commandeered a room for himself and slept for about six hours, probably, but instead he found himself wandering back down to the infirmary. He thought maybe there’d be a new databurst from Atlantis, or that Alaniz would be back from Area 51, and that would mean new ideas, new thoughts on how to get Rush out of the untenable fucking situation that they, all of them, had put him in. But Alaniz wasn’t there.

Telford was.

He was sitting on the end of a gurney, looking tired and faintly rumpled. Instead of scrubs, he was wearing his black uniform— the jacket unbuttoned to show a white wifebeater hugging his solid chest.

He seemed as surprised to see Young as Young was to see him. “Everett,” he said, his eyebrows flicking upwards like astonished punctuation marks.

“David,” Young said. “I— didn’t know you’d been cleared.”

“I haven’t been.” Telford nodded toward the door. “You didn’t see my escort out there?”

There’d been two airmen stationed outside the infirmary who’d checked Young’s badge, but— “They’ve had someone here twenty-four-seven for the last few days,” Young said. “I guess Lam is, uh, working on some sensitive research with Area 51.”

Telford rolled his eyes. “You’ve always been a shitty liar.”

“You know I can’t tell you.”

“Yeah. I know.” Telford rubbed his face. He seemed to have gotten wearier since seeing Young. “You’re off the crutches, huh?”

“Well— unofficially.”

That got a faint smile. “Good for you. Fuck the police, right?”

“I forgot them. I was in a rush.”

“In a rush,” Telford echoed. The last word sat between them uncomfortably, taking up space.

“Yeah.” Young wondered if Telford could read it on his face, whatever _it_ was, the thoughts that felt guilty, about kissing Rush and holding him as he slept, about the brief broken-off fantasies that he didn’t let get started, because it was wrong, under the circumstances, for him to be thinking about that shit: what would happen if he rolled Rush over and— if Rush crawled into his lap, indifferent to boundaries as always— what would it take to get to the wall that Rush finally broke against, how long would Young have to hold him still and work at him— or maybe Rush would be all restless motion, squirming and panting and breathing out his usual streams of nonsense as he let Young touch the body that no one else got to touch—

He thought he was flushing, and didn’t know how to stop. He cleared his throat. “So if you’re not cleared, why, uh—?”

Telford’s mouth turned down. He looked away. “I’m waiting for the test results. Lam said she’d have them tonight.”

“Ah.”

“Even that fucking Lucian defector got hers first.”

“Are you supposed to know about her?” Young asked a little cautiously. He hadn’t really been paying attention to the protocol surrounding Ginn, figuring that it was probably going to be chopped liver the first time Rush found it inconvenient, and therefore he was mostly going to be relegated to damage control.

Telford shrugged, without much energy. “You know how it is. People talk. The first few days after the incursion, security wasn’t exactly at its best. Plus, I was beat to shit and doped-up. Makes people feel sorry for you.”

“Yeah.” Young watched him for a minute. The current of restlessness and tension that he’d seen in Telford’s body when he’d visited him the previous week was absent. In its place was something heavier and more defeated. “I should’ve asked,” Young said. “How you are. How you’re doing.”

“You’d be surprised how often people forget to.” Telford smiled humorlessly. “I feel like I’m already dead. It’d be easier, wouldn’t it?”

“No,” Young said automatically. “Of course not. What’re you talking about? I know it’s been a long month, but you’re gonna get out of here, back to active duty. This time next month you’ll be bitching about raking leaves off your lawn, and Mitchell’ll be calling you a sucker for deciding to buy instead of rent.”

“Right.” Whatever weight Telford was carrying seemed to increase. He lowered his gaze, studying the nails on one hand. Telford had always had really beautiful hands for a man. He kept them carefully, in a way that never came off as womanish on him. The nails were always cut close, the cuticles cared for, the calluses from shooting invisible unless you really knew what to look for. “Did I ever tell you why I did that?”

“What? Bought a house, instead of renting?”

“Yeah.”

Young shook his head.

“I know some people thought it was weird,” Telford said, “or— nouveau-riche, maybe. You know, all those stupid-ass kids fresh out of Basic, sinking their bonus on hundred-grand cars and McMansions for their girlfriends.”

“I think most people who didn’t know you just thought you were divorced,” Young said. “And most people didn’t know you.”

It was true, although he hadn’t ever really thought about it. How few people seemed to really know Telford.

Telford barely seemed to have registered his words. “Have you ever wanted something,” he said, “and thought to yourself: If I can just fake it till I make it, at some point it’ll just settle into me. Like overwriting your original programming, or the way you have to focus so hard when you’re training on a new weapon, thinking about distance and weight and the time it takes the bullet to travel, so that when you’re out there in the field, you don’t have to think about those things. You just cock the gun and pull the trigger. Like you’ve been doing it all your life. Like you were born to do that. Have you ever… ?”

Young looked away, then— painfully— back at him. He didn't know what was in his face at that moment. “You know I have,” he said, his voice tight. “You know I do.”

Telford’s expression was resigned. “Yeah. So.”

“Is that what it was about? The house?”

“That’s what it was about,” Telford said. But there seemed to be something he wasn’t saying, something that the effort of keeping unspoken briefly turned his face taut.

There was a long silence.

“I’m sorry,” Young said.

“What the hell are _you_ sorry for?”

“That you feel that way. That this is happening to you. The quarantine, SG-3, the Lucian Alliance.”

Telford’s face twisted in a way that wasn’t easy to interpret. “It’s what I asked for,” he said. “One way or another. I asked for it; I signed up. I _fucked_ up.”

“You didn’t—“

“And you’re not sorry about Icarus.”

“I am,” Young said, and meant it. “And I’m not.”

Telford shook his head, his mouth bitter. “Jackson should’ve stayed the fuck out of it. He never should’ve gotten you involved. You wish you didn’t know about it now, that you’d never found out.”

“I don’t know.” Trying to think through that particular problem took so much effort that Young found himself turning away, shoving the heel of his hand against his forehead, like he could physically force his thoughts to stick together in a way that made sense. “I can’t wish that. I can’t un-know it. I don’t even remember what it was like to be someone who didn’t know.”

“That’s probably best,” Telford said. “Never look backwards. I keep telling myself that.”

That wasn’t exactly what Young had meant, but he didn’t offer a correction. “After you get cleared,” he said, “we’re gonna have to talk about it. I’m not leaving the project, but I assume you’re gonna try to get me kicked off.”

“Getting a little bit ahead of yourself there, cowboy, aren’t you?”

The faint smile and the use of the nickname were hard for Young to accept. He’d always liked it when Telford called him _cowboy_. It’d felt less like they were outlaws shooting up the old West and more like they were kids at school, with the whole world so as-yet-unformed around them that a patch of cottonwood trees could be the Pinkertons one minute and a gang of Cheyenne dog soldiers the next. He hadn’t known Telford when the world was still like that. By the time they served together, it had already started to set, some invisible force pruning away ruthlessly at the options in circulation, crafting a simpler and more certain landscape. There were times when Young had thought that Telford was close to cutting through the skin of that landscape, losing patience with it and just tearing it back to reveal the secret place where all those pruned parts had been sent to. But he never did, or at least, if he did, he didn’t share the moment with Young. He kept it in that small, dark, private lead-lined box inside him where Young had never ever managed to get.

“I really don’t think you’re brainwashed,” Young said. “Do you?”

“Well, that’s the _point_ , Everett. I don’t know, do I?” Telford sighed and stretched out on the gurney, folding his arms behind his head. The change in posture was probably supposed to communicate how totally relaxed he felt about the issue, but instead something about it seemed to itch with restlessness. “Anyway, it’s not like Schrödinger’s cat; whether I am or I’m not, it’s already happened. I can’t do anything about it. I might as well just… plan.”

“You act like it doesn’t make a difference to you.”

“Of course it makes a difference to me.” Telford stared at the ceiling. His jaw worked with an audible click. When he spoke again, his voice was still conversational. “It horrifies me,” he said, “if you have to fucking know. It’s always horrified me. I think I’d kill myself if I found out… because you could never be sure, after. You could never be _really_ sure. If it was you, or just… someone else’s decision about what you should be like. How you should feel. What you should do.”

“Is this what you’ve been thinking about?” Young asked in a low voice. He felt a little sickened. “All by yourself in that isolation room?”

“Oh, a little of this, a little of that.” Again, that conversational tone, that easy smile. “Once the doubt’s introduced, you try to account for yourself. You go through your memories;you think— _surely_ I’d know if they weren’t real. I’d know. They’d feel different. Even though you wouldn’t. Then the existential shit sets in. You start to think: was it ever my choice? Any of it? From the beginning? I’ve made bad choices. I’ve made— some really bad choices, Everett.” Something about his facade slipped. He looked away abruptly. “You were there. You know I have. It’d be a pretty goddamn convenient out if they turned out not to be my choices. If it weren’t for the complete, pant-shitting, soul-destroying fear that nothing would ever really be my choice again.”

Young studied him. “I didn’t know you felt like that.”

Telford shrugged minutely. “Well: now you do. I think—“ His eyes strayed. “I think I’d do anything to avoid it. To make sure I had a choice.”

“You said something like that in one of the committee meetings. I read the transcripts.”

Telford closed his eyes. He looked beatific, his eyelashes black against his cheeks. “The butterfly and the boot.”

“Yeah.”

“I can be very fucking philosophical when the mood takes me.”

Young risked moving closer, haltingly, and leaning against the opposite gurney. “I wish I’d known that about you.”

“What— that I’m such a philosophical genius, or that, like any other mere mortal, I have my weakness?”

“Both. Either. I don’t know.”

Telford opened his eyes and turned his face towards Young. It was a rare moment of unvarnished seriousness. He looked so much more appealing like that: his eyes liquid and restful, a very small frown making his lips purse— a palette of darknesses from his soft hair to the very faint lines that framed his mouth. “I didn’t want you to get hurt,” he said.

“Why would it hurt me to know that—“

But Young was interrupted by Lam emerging from the inner depths of the infirmary. She was carrying a blue cardboard file folder, and frowning slightly at its contents. She seemed surprised to see him when he looked up. “Colonel Young,” she said. “I thought you’d left.”

“I stopped by to see if Dr. Alaniz was back from Area 51,” Young said.

“She’s next door. I’m afraid there’s no news. I was just coming to tell Colonel Telford that our tests have cleared him.”

Telford registered no outward reaction to that. “You’re sure,” he said.

“Very sure. I want to keep you here for another day, because it seems like you’re having an adverse reaction to the serum we used to test you— it’s probably why you’ve been feeling so tired. You’re running a little bit of a fever. I’ll give you some acetaminophen, and hopefully you should be fine by tomorrow.”

“Fine,” Telford repeated. He seemed slightly dazed.

Young extended a hand. “Congratulations,” he said. “Welcome back to the Icarus Project. Provisionally.”

After a moment’s delay, Telford accepted the gesture. His gaze darted briefly to Young’s face: complicated, searching. His hand was very warm. “Thank you,” he said.

* * *

Eventually Young did go to bed, though only after he’d bothered Alaniz so much that she’d turned surly and thrown a pen at him. Young had ducked, so that it clattered against the concrete floor. When he’d dared to poke his head up again, he’d said, “You know, Rush is rubbing off on you.”

“Go get some fucking sleep, why don’t you,” Alaniz had said.

So Young made his way up to one of the on-call rooms and crashed there for what felt like ten minutes but turned out to be six hours, till he was paged to the first of the morning’s meetings and the whole cycle of the day began again.

He’d dreamed something disturbing, he thought vaguely, later that afternoon, listening to Alaniz and one of the Area 51 geeks talk in a really technical, over-pitched way about electromagnetic radiation and Ancient tech. Jackson and Lam, who were the other members of this particular meeting, seemed to be following. It all had to do with the Ancient control chair, the one that was sitting in Antarctica. Whoever was in charge of the Area 51 project had convinced Atlantis to send them the ruins of a chair that they’d found on one of the Ancient colony worlds in Pegasus, and Area 51 had cannibalized its tech to try to figure out more about the way the chairs operated, and hopefully in the process develop a rig that would let gene carriers communicate with the Antarctica chair from Colorado. Mostly what they’d learned so far seemed to be a lot about the unusual frequencies of gene carrier brain waves. Young hadn’t known until a couple of days ago that brain waves even _had_ a frequency.

He’d dreamed that he was someplace dark, and Telford was pushing a pin into him slowly— a pin the size of an officer’s sword. It went through his vital organs, and his limbs twitched like the wings of a butterfly that didn’t understand yet why it wasn’t capable of flight. That was where the dream had come from, obviously. The butterfly and the boot. But Telford hadn’t crushed him. The pin hadn’t even hurt. It was just that all the air had gone out of him and he’d felt the pressure of it, leaving him leaden, deformed, and immobile.

“The obvious question,” Lam said, after Alaniz had switched of the Area 51 video feed, “it seems to me, is whether the alternative to the oscillation-interference devices we’re currently using is to induce physiological changes that would render Dr. Rush capable of tolerating these abnormal brain waves. It seems clear that Ancient physiology _was_ in fact tolerant of them, and that Dr. Rush’s genome may be the origin of their production.”

Jackson, seated on the far side of the table, adjusted his glasses. “That doesn’t seem clear to me,” he said.

“I’m curious to hear Dr. Alaniz’s opinion on this issue,” Lam said.

Young could guess why. Alaniz had been given clearance only to the extent necessary for her to understand Rush’s medical background. She didn’t know about Jackson’s “river of the body” and the benchmarks. She didn’t know about Anubis and his labs. She didn’t know about the _real_ requirements of the Icarus Project.

“I don’t think Dr. Alaniz is qualified to speak about this issue,” he said, trying to keep his voice even.

Jackson said, “I’d go so far to say that the reason this is happening seems pretty _unclear_ to me, and like something we should probably devote more time to.”

Alaniz’s eyes flicked from Lam to Young to Jackson uncertainly. “I’m not familiar with what exactly would be involved in _inducing physiological changes_ , but it sounds pretty risky.”

“You suggested using CRISPR interference to silence the Ancient genes that we’re assuming are responsible for the problem,” Lam pointed out. “What I’m proposing is essentially the mirror approach. Rather than silencing the genes, we make them noisier.”

“That’s— we don’t have the technology to do that,” Alaniz said. She seemed taken aback. “Do we?”

“It’s a hypothetical question,” Lam said.

“I— certainly if the interference devices became untenable, and gene silencing was off the table, and quality of life was being compromised—“

“Dr. Alaniz, give us the room for a moment,” Young interrupted.

Alaniz fixed him with a confused and slightly mutinous stare. But she was Air Force to the core, and he was a superior officer, so after a second she turned smartly on her heel and left.

The instant the door closed behind her, Lam said, “You can’t unilaterally rule out—“

Young folded his hands on the table. “Until tomorrow,” he said, “or whenever Colonel Telford resumes command, you’re still stuck with me. And I don’t think that we need to be talking about experimenting on Rush three days after the last time we experimented on him— which, by the way, was a Hail Mary pass, and one that we’re still working out the kinks of— and, as Dr. Jackson points out, without actually understanding why exactly Rush started reacting the way he did.”

Lam pressed her lips together. “We can’t keep him here forever,” she said. “That isn’t a humane solution either. I know you know that. And I can’t make promises about the trackability of that electromagnetic signature. Colonel Carter and the Lucian hacker already reduced its bleedthrough as much as they could.”

“I know,” Young said. “I’m not saying let’s not talk about it. I’m saying— let’s wait a couple of days till all the fallout settles. All right?”

“An unfortunate choices of metaphor,” Jackson said under his breath.

* * *

Afterwards, in the hallway, Jackson said to him, “You’ve just bought yourself time to do— what, exactly?”

Young felt immensely weary. “I don’t know,” he said.

Telford had put him under glass in the dream, he thought. A glass box, airless and enclosing. He had wanted to pound his fists against it, get somebody’s attention. But he hadn’t even been able to do that. He’d just lain there, impotent and full of horror, with that foreign spike through the core of him.

* * *

It was dinnertime before Young made it back up to the room where he’d left Rush— only to find that Rush wasn’t there. He and his armed guard had apparently taken off somewhere, and as much as Young would’ve liked to picture Rush sitting in the mess and enjoying a nice, quiet, well-balanced, healthful meal, he had a feeling it was one of his more unrealistic fantasies. With a slight sinking feeling, he instead headed down to the infirmary.

Sure enough, Rush was there: sitting cross-legged on one of the gurneys, tapping away at a laptop keyboard and talking to Telford, who was stretched out on the gurney next to him.

“Wow,” Young said, eyeing them. “Look at this exciting reunion. Rush, I’m pretty sure I said no one was supposed to give you a computer.”

“Fuck you,” Rush said, without looking up.

Telford laughed. “Don’t worry; I told Lam I’d keep him out of trouble.”

“Right,” Young said skeptically. “There’s an old saying about foxes and henhouses, isn’t there?”

“Everett.” Telford adopted an expression of mock-disappointment. “I’m not going to _eat_ him.”

Again without looking up, Rush said shortly, “As though you could.”

“Please, Nick,” Telford said, casting his eyes upward. “We all know about your uplifting journey— crawling out of whatever slum it was in Scotland. But don’t embarrass yourself by pretending you could ever take down a cholo kid from the 505.”

The reference jolted Young. He hadn’t, in fact, known about Rush’s uplifting journey, although he thought he’d managed to surmise a fair amount. It bothered him that Telford had said something about it. It bothered him that Telford seemed to know more about Rush than he did. He thought that Telford had designed the comment to highlight how much he knew about where Rush came from, and that bothered him too. It made sense, he guessed, that Rush and Telford would have a lot to talk about if Rush came from the same kind of background, the kind that Telford made a point of never trying to conceal. But he liked that even less, the idea of Rush and Telford having a lot to talk about. Having talked to each other a lot. Having shared ground.

Rush didn’t seem to have liked Telford’s comment either. He glared at him over the top of his computer. “Fuck you, as well,” he said. “I could take down the both of you if I wanted.”

Telford made an amused, considering noise. “I seem to remember Young kidnapping you from your apartment about a month and a half ago. And that was before you started suffering from—“ He paused, and raised his hands to articulate a set of exaggerated air quotes. “ _Migraines_.”

Young looked at Rush.

Rush looked at him and shrugged. “That was the extent of the information that Dr. Lam saw fit to share with him.”

“I see,” Young said. He was surprised that Telford’s security clearance hadn’t been reinstated. Presumably as long as he was confined to the infirmary it wouldn’t be.

“Don’t worry,” Telford said. “I’m not going to ask. I think the little tacks are cute. Very Lalique-meets-Atlantis. If he ever gets out of here, he could start a trend.”

Rush had hunched back over his computer, determinedly ignoring both of them. Without breaking his concentration, he raised two fingers in a V to Telford.

“So, as great as you guys seem to be doing here,” Young said, “I actually came by to see if Nick wanted to get some dinner.”

“Why don’t you ask _David_ if _he_ wants to get some dinner?” Rush said with thinly disguised hostility.

Young frowned at him, taken aback. “Uh, because _David_ is confined to the infirmary. _You_ , on the other hand, are _not_ confined to the infirmary, and also holding a computer, which I don’t want you using and would prefer to replace with a plate of salad.”

Rush made a disgusted sound. “Iceberg lettuce,” he said. His lip curled.

“I know; what a tragedy. By the time you get out of here, those endives you stuck in my fridge are going to be wilted.”

“No.”

“I’m pretty sure they will.”

“A _wilted_ endive,” Rush said in pretty much his haughtiest tone of voice, “is generally taken to refer to a ripe specimen of the vegetable that has been lightly sautéed or otherwise exposed to heat so as to produce a wilted texture without any accompanying loss of flavor.”

“I see,” Young said gravely. He shifted slightly into a position from which he could maneuver Rush into catching his eye. Rush did so reluctantly before his gaze slid over to Telford, then rapidly and guiltily back. His whole face did something peculiar, like he was trying to delete all evidence that the moment had happened. It gave him a frantic, sulky look. Young considered, incredulously, the idea that Rush was jealous of Telford. He tried to communicate, again via the medium of his eyes, the fact that Rush shouldn’t be.

Rush frowned.

“You know,” Telford said into what had become a protracted silence, “if you two need to be alone—“

“No,” Young said hastily. “That’s not— anyway, we’re going to dinner.”

“I’m on a hunger strike,” Rush said, unmoved. “Until I’m released from this prison.”

Young sighed. “You realize that’s going to make people _less_ confident in your ability to, like, navigate normal human stuff? Not more.”

“At no point was _navigating normal human stuff_ enumerated as one of the requirements of my job.”

Young was going to make the point that navigating normal human stuff was usually taken as a given requirement of _every_ job, and that Rush’s job seemed like it was more-or-less _being Rush_ , which didn’t come with requirements, but definitely should— when he was forestalled by his phone ringing.

Caught off guard, he pulled it out and stared at it. Stargate personnel had authorization to carry phones in the Mountain, but getting past the jammers took a high-level code, and those were generally only used in emergency situations. This one was Jackson’s, but Young didn’t hear or see any signs of emergency here on the ground.

He answered: “Young here.”

“Are you with Rush?” Jackson asked without preamble.

Young’s eyes flicked to Rush before he could stop them. “Yeah.”

“Don’t react to what I’m about to tell you.”

“Okay,” Young said guardedly.

“I’m in Old Colorado City. Twenty minutes ago, a team in a white transit van pulled up to the street corner I’m standing on, zatted two undercover airmen, and drove off with Ginn in the back.”

In spite of himself, Young glanced at Rush again. He managed to stifle any other movement he might have made. He said, without any particular emotion in his voice, “Right.”

“We’re pretty sure she didn’t go willingly, but we can’t—“

“Yeah,” Young said. “I know. I get it.”

They couldn’t rule out the possibility that she had played them all. That she had always been playing them. And even if she hadn’t—

Young turned to face the wall. He pressed his hand flat against it, feeling the texture of the paint under his fingers. “This is— bad news,” he said, his voice audibly strained by the constraint of not revealing information. He considered immediately leaving the room. But that would alert Rush that something was wrong, that there was something Young was deliberately hiding.

“Yeah,” Jackson said. “She knows—“

“A lot.”

Jackson said, “You _cannot tell him_.”

Young could follow the reasoning. “I know,” he said.

It would be all-but-impossible to keep Rush on the base if he found out. Or they’d have to sedate him. He’d engineer a way to do something stupid, because that was what he _did_. There was a part of Young that wouldn’t’ve blamed him, in this situation: you didn’t leave people in the hands of the Lucian Alliance. Especially not when— He thought about her the previous morning, lecturing Rush on sleep; the two of them starting and finishing the poem. Young didn’t know her, really. He knew she liked _Jurassic Park_ , and that pretty much every time she saw him she informed him about a ballpoint pen that someone had given her, and that she’d never really trusted him, not totally, not the way she trusted Rush, with a huge, fragile, absolute, and only slightly skittish devotion that could destroy Rush. It was going to destroy Rush now, if Young let it.

For some reason, his hand had gone unconsciously to his lower back. To the heart-shaped ridge of his pelvis, where it curved in to meet his spine. He could feel the ache of all the damage right through him.

There was the brief muffled noise of Jackson talking with someone else on the other end of the phone. Then: “Mitchell says to make sure Rush is secured,” Jackson said, “and then come up here. He wants to share command with you, just in case this ends up being…” He trailed off.

Icarus Project-related, Young filled in. He said, “Just so you know, Telford got cleared. He’s stuck in the infirmary right now, but we should have him back in the next, I don’t now, twenty-four hours.”

Saying it made him raise his eyes involuntarily to Telford, who was watching him with a taut intensity.

Jackson was silent for a moment. “I see,” he said.

“But, yeah, I’ll come down there.”

“Good,” Jackson said. “Good. We’ll talk more when I see you.”

He didn’t say goodbye. The line clicked off.

Young held the phone to his ear for a second longer, listening to nothing. He missed the days when you at least got a dial tone. Something that wasn’t silence, something to keep you company.

He turned slowly and avoided looking at Rush. “David,” he said, “can I talk to you for a minute outside?”

Rush, as Young had anticipated, jumped on the hint of conspiracy like a dog savaging a bone. “What’s happening? What are you telling him that you refuse to tell me?”

“Secret colonel business,” Young said, affecting a dry, casual tone. “Very hush-hush. Come on, you know I can’t talk to you about this shit.”

Rush frowned, but Telford was already standing, striding past him, reaching out to tousle his hair.

“Oh, fuck you,” Rush snapped, hunching away from the touch. It was an effective distraction. “ _Secret colonel business_ ; if the two of you are so fucking high and mighty, you should do some of your _secret colonel business_ and get me out of here.”

“We could, but you’re just so pleasant to be around when you’re like this,” Telford told him, deadpan, and then put a light, steadying hand on Young’s shoulder as Young limped past. It was an obvious instinct; anyone would have done it. It wasn’t objectionable. But something about the touch felt deliberate and over-intimate. It lingered long past the moment Telford dropped his hand again, even after the two of them had exited the room.

* * *

“You can’t tell him,” Young said to Telford, just like Jackson had said to him, when he’d explained the situation.

Telford was silent, still absorbing what he’d heard. “Jesus,” he said.

“I know.” Young rubbed his jaw. “But we have to— try and keep this situation from spiraling out of control.”

Telford pulled a wry, weary face. “Let me point out the obvious obstacle to that goal: _Rush_ is involved.”

“Yeah, well, that's why we’re trying to keep him _un_ involved.”

“I get it.”

“I have to go up there,” Young said. “Can you keep him in the infirmary with you?”

“Yeah,” Telford said. “Not a problem.”

“If you have to get Lam involved, do it.”

“I’ve been in isolation,” Telford said, his face wry and weary in a different way now. “Not suffering from brain damage. I’m still a colonel. I can keep a hundred-pound Scottish computer hacker on an ultra-secure military base.”

“You _think_ that,” Young said, and then— struck by a wave of sourceless uneasiness, something maybe attributable to his lack of sleep or the disorienting hourlessness of the Mountain, where any individual moment could be midnight or the middle of the day— said, “Make sure you’ve got eyes on him all the time, okay? I really need you to keep him safe. Something about this just feels—“

He couldn’t articulate how it felt. He spread his hands helplessly. The muscles in his lower back offered a chorus of complaint. He always forgot how every part of the body was connected to every other part of the body, in ways that were too complicated and technical for him to make sense of, till what should have been an unrelated action caused old injuries to hurt.

“Don’t worry,” Telford said. “I’ll take care of him.”

His face was unreadable, like it always was in a crisis. The more that was on the line, the more Telford seemed to erase himself stroke by stroke— until he was just the outline of a man in a uniform. That wasn’t what he was actually doing; it wasn’t erasure. He just had some place he could send himself, and that was how he coped: by collecting up all his, for lack of a better term, identifying marks— his jokes, his weaknesses, his intellect, his outbursts of passion, any physical impulse— and performing a magic trick on them. The amazing disappearing David. Young envied him. He couldn’t do the trick.

“I know you will,” Young said.

He turned towards the elevator, not entirely sure he wanted to look at the magician’s illusion. He didn’t like that Telford. It felt like— what it was.

“I wish I were the one going,” Telford said unexpectedly, just as Young hit the button.

Young looked over his shoulder. Telford was watching him with dark, impenetrable eyes. It was anyone’s guess what he was thinking, feeling.

“Yeah, well,” Young said. “This one’s on me.”

“I know,” Telford said. “Sorry.”

The elevator pulled up, sending the electronic bell sounding. Young stepped into its box as the doors opened. He and Telford were face to face, almost, regarding each other across the line of the threshold.

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” Young said.


	34. Chapter 34

Rush reclined upon the no-doubt-deliberately Spartan padding of the medical gurney and devoted a considerable amount of his energy to repelling a Light-Brigade-esque charge by the armies of sleep. It was Light-Brigade-esque in that it was doomed to failure, because Rush was phenomenally gifted in the art of not falling asleep. And he had no intention of falling asleep— certainly not in the infirmary, where, hours earlier, Lam had subjected him to yet another in an apparently infinite series of EEGs, which he disliked and which had caused him to associate the entirety of the space with an atmosphere of siege and creeping dread; certainly not with Telford in the room, leaking his usual aura of prowling restlessness and secrets, now accentuated in Rush’s awareness by a pheromonal edge of having-fucked-Young; and certainly, _certainly_ not whilst Young was out and about in the outer world that was Colorado— presumably? presumably in Colorado, and not flung someplace potentially unreachable amidst the Ancient’s threaded-together satellite web— on some obscure “secret colonel business,” the urgency of which he had not been entirely successful in concealing from Rush.

He did not know how he _could_ sleep with the small weight of the _things_ on him. The twin weight. The double and incapable-of-disconnection weight. The sound he could not hear; the frequency that was not a sound; the machines that directed the needle of the frequency inward, through the conducting bones of his skull, so that it could pierce the membrane of his self. But he _had_ slept and so he knew that he could sleep and perhaps this was one of the things that the transmitters had altered. How would he know? He wouldn’t. He didn’t. He couldn’t. He imagined a version of himself who could not sleep. What other distinguishing characteristics did that Rush possess? What poems could he recite? What sentimental urges undercut him? Did he still place his aching head in Young’s lap, like an idiot, perhaps _the_ idiot, the one dribbling sentences of sound and fury, expecting some significance to emerge and some improving moral to cohere? Fuck him.

He wished that Young had not left the base.

He wished that he knew who had been on the other end of the phone call.

He wished that he did not have the things attached to his head.

“For Christ’s sake,” Telford said, sounding exasperated, “can you stop banging that pen against your glasses?”

Rush had not been aware that he was doing this.

“Fuck off if you don’t like it,” he said, and continued tapping the pen against the wire edge of his glasses, this time deliberately and with metronymic precision.

Telford huffed from where he was stretched out lazily upon the far bed. “I’m confined to the infirmary, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Your presence has been noted and objected to.”

He thought it was late. It felt late. He did not know how _late_ felt, exactly, except that it had a quality of exhaustion or of things moving towards their completion, the arrival of some unavoidable end. Alone, he dreaded night because he saw for himself no possibility of such a completion. He didn’t sleep— didn’t voluntarily sleep— tried not to— and was therefore denied sleep’s small death and regeneration. It just went on and on, didn’t it, the long and aimless ineffective stochastic iterating of life. He despised it. He ought to ask Ginn what night was like in deep space, he thought. The idea of arbitrary temporal cycles imposed on darkness horrified him, but seemed fitting. She would frame it as something improving, probably, because she had taken on the burden of optimism. But he knew better. He had seen her face, as she tipped it up towards the sun.

“May I leave yet?” he asked Telford, purely to annoy the other man.

“I don’t know; has the situation materially changed since the last time you asked me?”

“Our spatiotemporal position has altered, so one might argue: yes.”

“One might argue that you’re full of shit.”

“I want my computer back,” Rush said, folding his arms. It had been a half hour since Telford took the computer away.

“Then maybe you shouldn’t’ve used it to access the Icarus cyphers, when that was the one thing Young specifically said was off-limits.”

Rush shot a dark look at him. “As though you give a fuck. You _want_ me to solve them.”

Telford met his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

There was something enticing in his gaze, the promise of more below the surface, an unspoken invitation to come and see. That was what had always drawn Rush to Telford. Speaking to Ginn about it had reawakened the memory of their first meetings in California. Rush had assumed that the man who succeeded Jackson would be another Jackson: artless because had chosen to be artless, finding it the most effective posture. Jackson had never needed to hide himself, or not particularly. But instead they’d sent Telford, who wasn’t a scientist and who had shown up crisp, uniformed, officer-immaculate, the poster-boy of self-defeating imperialist violence. He was perfectly designed for Rush to dismiss, and yet something in the pattern of his speech— its sharpness, its tempo, its delicate calculation— had pulsed like a slow alarm between them. A instinctual recognition. That was before he’d broken protocol to show Rush the gate’s schematics, in essence inviting him to a private conspiracy, and afterwards drove Rush out to the seashore: not the bay front, but the actual shoreline, out on Muir Beach, where the ocean went on unimpeded to some point that it wasn’t possible to see. Rush had thrown stones into the sea: one after another, watching clouds move over the water, as Telford talked about distant stars, other planes of existence. The edgeposts of the world altered. Rush understood what Telford was offering: an axis that he could impale himself with. As the sun set, the water turning to wine and then to something not-quite-blood-like, Rush was filled with a sense of foreboding. But he knew what he was doing, he’d thought; he knew what he was getting himself into; he knew what it was going to cost.

Yet Telford did not now seem inclined to run and fetch him the computer back. Rush clenched his arms more tightly across his chest, aware that it made him look sulky. “Why are you here, anyway?” he demanded.

“Because I had an allergic reaction to whatever chemical they pumped me full of to prove I wasn’t brainwashed by the Lucian Alliance. But last time Lam took my vitals, she said she’d probably let me out tonight, so—“ Telford held up two fingers twisted together, sarcastically earnest. “Fingers crossed.”

Rush studied him without shifting his position. “They didn’t brainwash you. But they did other things.”

“They usually do.” Telford had lowered his eyes, pretending to straighten a wrinkle in his uniform jacket.

“I always wondered what happened to you. In the spring.”

“What, did you miss me?” A brief glint of a smile, the mocking curve of white teeth.

“You were the only one who wasn’t— tedious.” It was the most directly honest answer. “I didn’t have to make a pretense with you. You understood.”

Telford shook his head, still smiling. “You are such a bastard, Nick.”

“What?”

“Young and I were being tortured to death— we barely got out alive, and now Young’s a cripple— but God forbid you have to sit through some _tedious_ meetings, pretending to be interested in the fate of the planet or intergalactic war.”

Rush was stung. “Of course I’m interested in the fate of the planet,” he said curtly. “I _am_ a resident of it.”

“Yeah, but you don’t give a shit about yourself. Or anybody else. Just codes, codes, codes. Am I right?”

“Like I said,” Rush threw at him, “you understood.”

The smile was still there. It was all a game; conversations were always a game with Telford. “Yes. I understood some of the important things.”

Rush didn’t have anything he wanted to say to that.

He lay in stony silence, trying to listen for the inaudible pulse of the transmitters that were broadcasting their white noise into his brain. They prevented him from hearing music, he knew, but he couldn’t remember the music. When he tried, he gave himself a headache, and Lam had said not to do it. _Should I also try not to think of pink elephants?_ he’d asked her. She’d given him a flat look. _I don’t know,_ she’d said, _were you also experiencing florid hallucinations of pink elephants? If so, then: yeah, you should probably try not to think of them._

“Where’s Young?” he asked after a while. “I know he told you were he was going.”

Telford had reached down beside his gurney and collected a large book. “Yes,” he said without looking up, as he donned a pair of black plastic reading glasses. “He did.”

“But you’re not going to tell me.”

Telford flipped through several Bible-thin, onionskin pages. “You’re awfully concerned about him.”

“For someone who doesn’t give a shit about anyone, you mean?”

“Just wondering what’s going on with you two, exactly.”

“You can take your wondering and shove it up your—“

“No,” Telford said, cutting him off calmly.

It derailed Rush, which left him seething. “No?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

Rush jerked himself over to one side, so that his back was facing Telford. “Fine,” he bit out. “Fuck you, then.”

* * *

Telford was reading Young’s copy of _The Brothers Karamazov_ , which Rush noticed only when he set it aside as Lam entered the room. He remembered the offhanded condescension with which Telford had hefted the book, saying, _Dostoevsky, Everett? Really? Doesn’t seem like it’s your speed_. At the time Rush had broadly agreed with the assessment; he had, he now thought, _liked_ Young on a base physical level since their first encounter, a reaction that he had found uncomfortable and alarming. He had perhaps been attracted to him (even worse) in the way that he had always had a weakness for people who were stronger than him, physically capable, and socially apt, but would have classed him amongst the world’s dimmer lightbulbs. That was part of the attraction, sometimes, probably. He’d fucked dimmer. There was always rougher trade than you. How easy to love and be loved for twenty minutes by someone you didn’t have to know, and would never be known by. Who the fuck was Dostoevsky, in the grand scheme of things? But now it touched him in an unsettlingly warm and prickling way: the mental image of Young perhaps choosing the book from a shelf of World’s Greatest Classics, regarding it with his blunt serious frown, and purchasing it with an eye towards deliberate self-improvement. _Doesn’t seem like it’s your speed._ If Telford said such a thing now, Rush would not let him get away with it.

“If you want to stay the rest of the night,” Lam was saying to Telford, stripping a blood pressure cuff off him, “I can call down and have them set you up in one of the bedrooms. It’s pretty late, and you’ve had a long month.”

Telford looked rueful. “No offense, but I’d just as soon get the hell out of here.”

Lam’s mouth quirked. “No offense taken. Your clearance has been reinstated, so you shouldn’t have any problems with the guys at the exit. If you do, give me a call.”

“Thanks,” Telford said.

“I know the general wants to have a _talk_ with you—“ Lam put the word in scare-quotes— “so I wouldn’t consider yourself out of the woods yet, just so you know.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He stood, removing his glasses and tucking them into one of his unsnapped shirt pockets. “Should I leave Rush here? Young wanted someone on him 24/7, I think.”

“I am not a fucking _house cat_ ,” Rush said loudly, annoyed by the implications of the question. “You are not _petsitting_ me.”

The two of them looked at him in the particular way people had of looking at him, as though he were a _problem._ As though his very existence were an unexpected and exhausting knot in the universe’s fabric, one that they had for some reason found themselves tasked with having to untie. It made something curdle in his stomach. It stirred a violent and unnameable instinct. He did not like being looked at like that.

“He’s got a room upstairs,” Lam said finally. “Is his guard still outside?”

“I can take him up. It’s not a problem,” Telford said.

“Are you sure?”

“It’s on my way.”

“How _benevolent_ of you,” Rush said icily. He stalked to the door and flung it open. “Come on, then. Chop, chop. Wouldn’t want the cat getting out of the bag, now, would we?”

Telford exchanged a look with Lam and, hefting a duffel over his shoulder, crossed the room to take the weight of the door from Rush. “You know, you really are an unbelievable asshole,” he told Rush, sounding— more than anything— resigned.

* * *

But later, in the elevator, Telford said, in a conciliatory tone, “I can leave you the book if you want.”

Rush stared fixedly at the panel, with its neat rows of numbers. He was unable to travel in an elevator without coaxing meaning out of the little grid: how many numbers, what sums their rows and columns, their diagonals? The first and the last numbers, the second and penultimate, and so on, moving inwards? It was the mathematician’s curse. It was how people went mad. They made meaning where there was no meaning, where there was only noise, noise, noise. The noisy universe. But that was not how he had gone mad.

“Why would you do that?” he asked.

Telford shrugged. “You’re stuck here. I know the feeling. You seem bored. Kind of unhappy. I mean, I guess _migraines_ would make anyone unhappy.”

It was a disingenuous little flick on the shoulder, an invitation to conspiracy. To combat.

Rush said, “I haven’t got migraines.”

“I know,” Telford said.

“You’re cleared now, aren’t you? You could’ve had Lam tell you.”

Rush felt, more than saw, Telford’s very small smile. “But where’s the fun in that?”

The elevator came to a halt. The doors opened.

Rush said, “I can find my own way from here.”

As he had expected, however, Telford exited the elevator with him. “A gentleman always walks his date to the door,” he said.

“Oh, but David, I’m afraid I’ve no intention of dating you,” Rush said, his tone mild. “I hear it tends to end rather badly.”

It was the nastiest thing he knew to say, but that was part of the game they played, he and Telford, wasn’t it? Sharpening their knives against each other to show they cared, that they cared enough to display all their knives. That they knew the other would appreciate the killing quality of the manufacture. And this was, Rush thought with an unpleasant surge of triumph, a very killingly-manufactured blade.

Moreso than he had anticipated. Telford’s straight-legged and ever-so-slightly swaggering military stride stuttered before recovering. His jaw worked for a second. “I’d hit you for saying that,” he said conversationally. “If we weren’t on base.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Christ; keep up, won’t you? We know too much about each other for empty threats.”

“So this is— what? Jealousy?”

They had reached the door of Rush’s room. Rush paused, waiting for Telford to swipe his keycard. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

Telford swiped the card and opened the door. He looked around the sparse little room without expression. “Nice place,” he said. Then: “Let’s not do this.”

Rush pushed past him defiantly and threw himself down on the bed, affecting a pose of indifference. “Whyever not?”

“Because I like you, Nick, and I don’t want to have to look at you while I describe what Everett sounds like when he’s getting his dick sucked. But I _will_ do it, and you know I will. It’s just the way I am.”

Rush turned his back to the door and hunched in on himself slightly. He felt oddly sick and deflated. He had not expected this response— his own, that is; Telford’s he had expected. “Yes,” he said, his voice flat. “I know.”

The door clicked shut. But Rush was aware that Telford was still in the room. He listened to the touch of boot soles to concrete. He was not surprised when Telford sat on the bed beside him.

“It’s no good trying to be what you’re not,” Telford said, after a long silence. “I think you know that better than anyone. Other people, they act like they just want to sand off your edges. A little bit of home remodeling work. They don’t understand how much it cost to put the house together in the first place. They tell you it’s for your own good. But it’s for them, so that you’re— easier to work with.”

Rush found himself touching one of the small silver transmitters with a forefinger. Investigating its contours, its edges. When he realised what he was doing, he diverted his hand into raking his hair back. “Oh, be more transparent,” he said cuttingly. “Won’t you?”

Telford laughed: a surprisingly rich and fond sound. “Someday you’re going to realise that just because something seems straightforward doesn’t make it a trick.”

“I very much doubt it,” Rush said. But he relaxed his posture with conscious effort. and turned slightly to consider Telford: a dark silhouette against the room’s overhead light. “They’re transmitters,” he said at length.

Telford’s face expressed a confusion that might have been feigned or genuine. “What?”

“Transmitters.” Once more Rush touched the foreign texture of the metal at his temple. “They produce an electromagnetic signature that destructively interferes with my brainwaves. With certain parts of my brainwaves that were having an… adverse effect.”

Telford was silent for a long time. “I don’t understand. You were— what? Psychotic? Hallucinating?”

“I don’t know.” Rush spread his hand against the pillowcase beside him. Automatically, his fingers arched: assuming the position they would take upon the keys of a piano. He had the right hands for the piano. So he had been told. The perfect anatomy; he was made for it. “I could _hear_ it.”

He could see that Telford didn’t understand him. This was not surprising, he considered upon reflection; the last time he had spoken to Telford was during the Lucian Alliance attack on his apartment. He had not known that the ninth cypher was musical then. He had not yet gone to the distant white city with Sheppard. He had not yet been forced to come back. All that time, Telford had sat underneath the Mountain. Waiting.

“The ninth cypher is musical,” Rush said. “It’s meant to be played. One has to master the system of music; only then is it possible to— I don’t know yet, exactly, but I could hear it; I could _hear_ it, as though they were in my head with me; as though _it_ were there, not them but the noise they made, the noise itself, and I could understand it; like something cut out of amber coming to life; I almost _had_ it, I had the whole system worked out, twenty-two tones, but—“

His fingertips dug into the pillow, frustrated, hungry for the surface of absent keys.

“But?” Telford asked quietly.

“It was killing me.” He could’t feel it now. He could only remember the feeling. Presumably this was an experience similar to neuropathy: the awareness that there was flesh one could not feel, parts of the body that one was cut off from. Press against them, scrape them with nails, stab them with pens, and perhaps there might be a ghost of pressure, but one could not access the delicate web that had grown throughout that flesh, the root-system that sustained and carried sensation. _You’re looking atypically rhizomatic_ , Jackson had said. He remembered.

“So instead _they_ killed you,” Telford said. “They killed a part of you. To save the only part they wanted. No. The part they _needed_. The part of you that they thought they could use.”

He was watching Rush, serious and intent. It always felt slightly overwhelming to be the object of Telford’s attention. At times this irritated Rush: _how dare you_ , he thought. _How dare you— a lower life form, human— manage to elicit any response_. He was aware that he himself produced a variation of the effect; he had been told so. It was not pleasant to be the object of his attention, however. He disturbed; he barraged; he bruised; he transfixed. Ordinarily he brandished this quality as though it were a skill he had cultivated. However, recently he had found that he wished for some way to look at people that was not traumatic. One could, certainly, avoid looking at Young— just as an example— in such a fashion for a sufficient length of time. For twenty minutes. But, inconveniently, the elements of himself that would have to be thus partitioned were those that were most hungry for Young. Better not to— almost certainly— better not to _any of it_ — better not to risk the devouring, the eating-up—

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said to Telford, still unsettled by the weight of his gaze. “It’s— a temporary setback. It isn’t permanent. It’s not permanent. There must be a way to manage it; we may be badly designed, but the _tech_ isn’t; the gates, the cyphers, the coding; the technology is— It isn’t as though I’d let this stop me from solving the cypher. I wouldn’t. I’m not going to. I _will_ solve it.”

Telford looked down. “I know you will,” he said. “I just worry about you.”

Rush huffed out a sound of sceptical disbelief.

“I do!” Telford half-laughed, and this was why Rush had always liked him, though _like_ was not the right word. Here Telford was, quite nakedly manipulating him, and knowing that Rush was cognisant of it, and continuing to practice his dark little art in spite of the knowing. They could level with each other in this manner, two men who knew how the world worked and therefore were prepared to hurt and be hurt at every juncture. It was like sailing through a technically tricky passage whilst sight-reading at the piano. You realised with a sense of competence and satisfaction that you had already mastered the mechanics necessary for this.

“Fuck off,” Rush said without much vitriol.

“I just want you to have a choice,” Telford said. He placed a hand on Rush’s ankle, just above the leather topline of his low boot. It was intrusive, presumptuous, an assured transgression. “Everyone wants to protect you, but they do it by keeping things from you. Things you should know.”

Rush stayed perfectly still. “Things like what?” he asked in a controlled tone.

“You know they know more than they’re saying about your genome. About why it’s important. You know that _Young_ knows.”

“Yes,” Rush said. “And?”

“I get where he’s coming from. Everett is— he’s always been a little bit tender-hearted, you know? He comes off tough; he tries so hard; if anything, he overdoes it, because underneath it all is this big-eyed kid trying to make sure all the sheep are safe in the pasture, or goats, or whatever the hell he grew up herding.”

There was, in his voice, a note of something brittle and desiccated and painful, like the skeleton of a stinging nettle pressed too flat inside a book.

“All those animal kids,” Telford said. “They grow up never learning that people are different. That you can’t treat people like that. You can’t just lock them up in a convenient stable because you’re afraid of what they might do if they found out…”

“Found out what?”

Telford was silent.

“You’re speaking about something specific,” Rush said.

“Look,” Telford said. “He said not to tell you. Earlier. He has his reasons.”

His hand was very warm on Rush’s leg. Careful, resting, not constraining. Rush stared at his own fingertips on the white pillowcase. They moved without his volition, restive. As though they knew something he didn’t. Get up, they seemed to be communicating. Get up, get up.

“David,” he said in a very calm, even voice, “where is Young?”

Telford drew a breath and let it out slowly. “That call he got— your Lucian girl was picked up on a street corner tonight. Some guys in a van, armed with Goa’uld weapons; looks like an Alliance snatch team.”

For some reason the information seemed to take a phenomenally long time to reach Rush’s consciousness. He wondered if there was something wrong with the transmitters. Perhaps they were misfiring, slowing his thoughts. He considered mechanically the means through which this might happen, and concluded that he was not possessed of enough knowledge about the physical workings of brains. This was a deficiency that suddenly seemed quite inexcusable. He would have to get a book, he thought; he would have to have Young get him a book. Something that explained neurons and so on.

“Ginn,” he said, as though he might not have understood the situation correctly, as though there were some point that needed clarifying in what Telford had said.

Telford said, “That’s the one.”

“She’s not— _my_ Lucian girl,” Rush said haltingly. “I hardly know her.”

Telford shrugged. “Then I guess Young shouldn’t’ve bothered.”

Rush stood up suddenly. The blood rushed to his head, because he had been lying down on the bed for a surprisingly long time. He was startled by the experience of dizziness. He started to sit down again, or rather collapse, but Telford caught him by the waist and elbow.

“Do _not_ pass out,” Telford said, sounding alarmed. “Jesus, that’s the last thing I need.”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Rush said, blinking away stars in huge and shapeless nebular explosions.

“Sit the fuck down. Let me get you some water; I think I’ve got some in my bag.”

As it turned out, he did: a slightly crumpled, half-full store-brand bottle that he made Rush sit and drink. It tasted like metal, as most bottled water did. Rush stared at the label, which depicted an idealised and no-doubt-fictional Colorado spring. Perhaps _the_ Colorado spring, the one for which the city was named; was there such a place? Rush had not enquired. He had not been interested. Ginn would be interested; she had a habit of fixating in an erratic fashion on facts of this nature. She would demand an answer. No doubt it would rapidly become, like her other fixations, profoundly irritating.

“Young said not to tell you,” Telford said again. He was sitting beside Rush. “But if it were me, I’d want to know.”

Rush didn’t look at him. He was not interested in Telford’s ongoing and not-terribly-artful project to establish himself as morally superior to and more trustworthy than Young. It had exhausted him previously, and now— now it made him want to enact violence. He wanted to enact violence anyways now. “Where?” he asked.

Telford affected ignorance. “Where what?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Nick—“

“I just want to know.”

There was a moment where it seemed like Telford would not tell him. Then he sighed and looked down. “Old Colorado City.”

“Where will they take her?”

Telford shook his head. “If they’ve got a cloaked ship in orbit, then all of them have probably already been beamed up. Otherwise— there are bases. Safehouses. When I was undercover with Sixth House, there were safehouses. I don’t know if there are anymore.”

“ _Where?_ ” Rush demanded again.

“Look— my information is almost a year out of date. If Young thought I could’ve helped—“

“ _Fuck_ Young.” The strength of his anger surprised him. It had no particular direction; fuck Young, he thought, but fuck all of them; everyone around him, all those empty bodies maggot-holed with secrets, lying and lying and concealing...  _O rose thou art sick._ He had to curl his hands into fists to get the feeling under control. “I’m getting out of here; I’m not going to just fucking _sit_ here; I’m not going to just _leave_ her for them to—“

“I thought she wasn’t your Lucian girl,” Telford said— not quite mocking, but not quite _not_ -mocking. His face was unreadable.

“And fuck you too. You _bastard.”_

Telford looked down. “I can get you out of here, but I’ve got to be honest— in all likelihood, there’s nothing you can do.”

“Don’t you fucking say that to me!” Rush pushed himself off the bed and wheeled on Telford, levelling an unsteady finger at him. “Don’t _you_ , of all people— first of all, _fuck_ you for saying that, when you know, you _know_ what it looks like when that is true, and I do not fucking _accept_ that it is true in this case, and I do not accept that I will ever, _ever_ again have to allow it to be true. And second of all, _fuck_ you for saying that— you of all people, because I know for a _fact_ that Young came for you. I don’t know what the fuck you were up to, and I don’t care; it was probably your own bloody fault, and I’m sure he knew it, but he’s one of your animal people, so he was there. Wasn’t he? _Wasn’t_ he?”

He had gotten quite close to Telford— too close. His body felt overheated. He was breathing hard and he reached forward and closed his hands around the straight collar of Telford’s jacket. The backs of his knuckles brushed Telford’s throat, where he could feel the pulse beating. The current of violence was running hot in him. In a quick jerky motion he tore the jacket open. One black button and then another went skittering like frightened insects into the corners of the room. Telford’s breath had picked up to match Rush’s. There was something sexual about the encounter, as there so often was in violent confrontations. It was an overlap, a bleed-through, that Rush could not entirely explain. What role had desire in anger or hatred? Then again, perhaps it was only the violence itself, the physical act, the need to _touch_ someone, to _impact_ them, to _make_ them feel what you wanted, what you wanted them to feel. But he did not know what he wanted Telford to feel, and he did not know what he wanted, exactly. He knew that he could no longer stay in this cell and that if he did he really thought he might go mad.

He lowered his gaze to Telford’s chest. The line of a scar was visible emerging above the white cotton vest he wore beneath the jacket: a white suture on his darkly tanned skin. Rush had known, from what Young had said, from what Ginn had said, to look for it.

“He was there,” Rush said again, softly. “Wasn’t he?”

He brought a fingertip to the scar and felt Telford flinch beneath the touch.

Then, in a move whose swiftness Rush could not comprehend, Telford had the bones of his wrist in a grip that hurt and was forcing his arm back without apparent effort. He hadn’t even risen from the bed.

“Don’t,” Telford said. Just the one word. His voice was uncharacteristically low and brutal, the single syllable like a breath that Rush had somehow punched out of him. “I’ll take you to your fucking safehouse. I was always going to. But you don’t get to talk to me about that.”

They stared at one another.

“You’re hurting me,” Rush said— a stupid set of words, as though he was amazed that Telford might do so, as though he hadn’t ever imagined such a possibility.

Telford released Rush’s arm and seemed to physically shake off the moment of violence. He stood, and faced away from Rush for a moment. When he turned, his face had been restored to its neutral mask.

“I’m sure as shit not getting blamed for you fainting on top of everything else,” he said. “At least take the fucking water bottle with you.”

* * *

Security at the gate did not attempt to detain them. Telford authorised Rush’s departure, signing some sort of insulting and dehumanising form in triplicate. Telford’s car was in the lot, where it had apparently been for more than two months while Telford was first offworld and then detained. It started without hesitation. The stereo was for some reason playing Penderecki: the Partita for Harpsichord, et al. Rush made a sound of disgust and switched it off.

“I should have played the fucking Ligeti,” he said under his breath— the first time he had spoken since they left the cell.

He felt Telford glance at him in the darkness as they exited the lot and turned onto the open road. “I would’ve thought you’d like Penderecki,” Telford said.

“I don’t believe for a moment that _you_ do.”

Telford was silent. He pushed a button on the stereo, and its green display changed. The quiet notes of some sort of exhausting sentimental jazz began to whisper through the car. Rush recognised the voice as Chet Baker, but could not identify the song. He made a face and uncapped the bottle of water, swallowing a metallic mouthful.

“Sorry,” Telford said after a moment. “You hate jazz, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Rush said. He rested his head against the windowpane. The shock had worn off, and the adrenaline of the fight had left him, and he was feeling very profoundly tired. He did not want to talk to Telford because he did not want to think about Ginn, and at the moment he could not imagine talking about anything else.

“I’m trying to figure out if that’s more or less pretentious than liking it.”

“You’re the one who’s reading _The Brothers_ fucking _Karamazov_.”

Telford passed another car on the sparsely populated freeway, wheels accelerating against the white tarmac. He glanced at Rush again. “Have you read it?”

“I prefer to read literature in the original language, and my Russian is—“ For some reason he had to search for the word, his brain too sluggish to provide even nonsense alternatives. “Nonexistent.”

Telford laughed. “That is an _incredible_ piece of bullshit. I’ll have to remember that for the next time I’m trying to con someone at a party.”

“You don’t go to parties,” Rush said. He felt cross, in part because he had told Telford the truth, and in part because Telford seemed so contemptibly ordinary, so casual, as though he could turn it off like a switch— the fear, the anger. He had such consummate control of his body. Rush envied him. _He_ did not even have the control to get the cap back on the bottle of water; he fumbled with it three and then four times, his fingers unaccountably failing to obey his commands.

“Sometimes I do. Strategically.” Telford watched the freeway, his eyes moving restlessly in the dark. “It’s not a very interesting book, but it has one passage I’ve always found… arresting. Provocative, you might say. It’s a story one of the brothers tells, about a Spanish inquisitor who imprisons Christ after his return and plans to burn him at the stake.”

“The Grand Inquisitor,” Rush said. It was the book’s most famous chapter.

“Yes. The inquisitor’s argument is that Christ fucked up when he was tempted by the Devil. He should have taken the bread and the kingdoms of heaven and earth, and ensured that mankind was fed, protected, ruled justly. Instead, he thought it was more important that everyone gets to choose whether or not to be saved. But they make the wrong choices, see. They destroy themselves; they destroy each other.”

Rush was finding it difficult to focus on what Telford was saying. He shook his head, trying to clear it. The stars seemed to smear against the glass of the car’s windscreen.

“The thing is, though,” Telford continued, “Dostoevsky sets up a simplistic dichotomy: bread, or freedom of choice. Totalitarianism, or liberation. What he doesn’t get— probably because he didn’t grow up hungry— is that without bread there _is_ no freedom. Without bread, there’s only how you’re going to get bread. If you want people to be free, you’ve got to give them the bread first. It’s a paradox. You’ve got to make sure they’re safe. Sometimes that means taking away their choices. But even you— _even you_ — never really had a choice to begin with.”

“I don’t know why you’re telling me this,” Rush said. He was feeling slightly queasy. “I don’t— disagree with you, in theory.”

“I know you don’t,” Telford said. “I knew that you would understand.”

They had exited the freeway at some point when Rush was not paying attention. But there were no buildings in sight. The country was all hills and desert south of Colorado Springs, for miles, without settlements. It had not occurred to Rush to wonder why Telford had taken 115. Why had it not occurred to him to wonder?

“Understand what?” he asked. His consonants were slurred. Dread tried to break through a cloudy layer of ice that seemed to cover his consciousness. He felt muffled. Was it the transmitters? He did not think it was the transmitters. Why had it not occurred to him to wonder? He tasted bile at the back of his throat. “I,” he managed. “I feel ill. I need you to stop the car, please.”

“You’ll be all right,” Telford said. His face was set.

“Stop the car, please,” Rush said again.

"We're almost there."

The car continued its motion, following the spectre of its own headlamps down a badly paved sideroad, the feathered fingers of trees looming out of the dark and then receding, the occasional flash of an animal eye suggesting the dangers that lurked in night’s dense and impenetrable abyss. The abyssopelagic zone, where light can’t penetrate and odd, sharp, scuttling, boney creatures battle to survive. That was what it reminded him of, this haunted night. The air was like water. Don’t go in the water, Rush thought half-hysterically. The water—

The water.

He looked down at the crumpled bottle in his hand.

There had been something in the water.

“David,“ he whispered, “what did you do?”

Telford’s hands tightened on the wheel. The car accelerated. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I am, Nick.”

“Ginn—“

“She should never have betrayed the Alliance. She knew the risk. For what it’s worth, if she’s still alive, I might be able to persuade Kiva that I need her to work on the cyphers. She’s not an irrational person— Kiva, I mean; she’s—“

It occurred to Rush, much too late, that he needed to move.

He needed to _move_ and the car was a cage and he needed to move and he needed to _remove_ himself from this cage-car that was taking him towards something to be sorry for oh God but Telford would not stop driving—

Uncoordinated with panic, Rush hurled the water bottle at him.

The brakes squealed and the car swerved.

Rush fumbled with the door. But it was locked, of course it was, and he could not find the button, and he was scrabbling against the plastic, clumsy and stupid, stupid, _stupid_ , Telford grappling one-handed with him, the claustrophobic night against the window, and he got the door open, and the car was still moving, and Telford’s fingers were digging into him, so he brought his legs up and lashed out, and then he was pitching out onto the roadway, shoulders-first, the momentum carrying him through several full rotations as the gravel of the road chewed through his his jeans and the palms of his hands, and he was paralyzed by horror or by the heaviness of his body, so hard to move with this chemical depressant coursing through his veins; but he _had_ to, he had to _run_ , but he could not, so he crawled towards the tree-line, breath panting out hot and scared, and he was very briefly, very pettily, irrationally angry that Young was not there; he _needed_ Young, he needed, he wanted _Young_ there— so he fished his phone out of his pocket, visions of Glasgow, the bird, the tree, the bell, the fish, and he could call Young because Young had insisted— so he didn’t have to know the number, but the difficulty was that he did not know where he was or how to explain, and he was fairly certain that he had caused Telford to crash the car, but he did not think this was going to prove effectual in the long term, so in the daggertooth jaws of despair he dialed the number and hurled his phone in an arc up the slope because he was not going to fucking die without a trace, and then he groped in the same direction, much slower, much too slow, clutching at fistfuls of wet grass and a rough tree trunk, trying to lever himself to his feet because he needed to get up, _get up_ , God, _Christ_ , it was fucking pathetic, get _up_ you bastard, but he could not do it, however much he gritted his teeth, and someone was saying, “Get up, _get up_ ,” but it was not him, it was Telford, grabbing his shoulders and attempting to drag him up, and Rush kicked at him and Telford said, “Son of a bitch; you can’t just go to sleep, can you; no, you have to fuck up _everything_ , like always—“ and he got a hand in Rush’s hair and _wrenched_ and Rush cried out and his head came down and the world went white for a moment and its orientation altered and he was face-down in the dirt, sick and cold and aspirating fine particles of the sandy soil characteristic of the barren West, and it tasted alien, American, matutine, and he coughed, gasping, and Telford put a boot on his back and said, “Stay there,” as though other options were available, when in fact all other options had been excised and therefore Rush lay in the dirt, impotent and aching and flung back into a child’s body across so many years, something that made his eyes wet with anger, because he could not do anything about it, because at any instant now he was going to be picked off the surface of consciousness by force and flung by indifferent fingers into the dark like one would flick a beetle out of a window, sending it turning and turning and turning and—

“This is Whydah,” Telford said somewhere over his head.

Turning and turning and—

“I need a pickup. I’ve got the hardware, and the situation is under control, but I lost my transport.”

turning and—

“No, we can cut the tracker out of him on the ship. We've got time.”

turning—

“I’m sending my coordinates.”

—in the widening—

“Initialise on my mark.”

—gyre—


	35. Chapter 35

Young stood on the corner of Pikes Peak Avenue, feeling exhausted, gazing up at the few outlier stars that the streetlamp hadn’t sent shrinking into the darkness. He’d grown up with the whole stellar population, and he still found it weird not seeing it. He didn't like the stars’ tendency to disappear. Even though it was just light pollution, he felt like he was getting farther away from them when they did that, like they went dark because they were basically saying, _There’s no point; you’ll never make it here._

Cars were passing in the intersection. People were out on the sidewalks. Mitchell had only cordoned off the pizza parlor and its one block. They were trying to pass this off as a training exercise, which meant a certain delicacy of attitude and a low profile: It’s not really serious; we’re just pretending; nothing to worry about; it’s only a game.

But it wasn’t a game. The two airmen had regained consciousness and were talking to Jackson; they’d already told their story to Young, but Jackson kept pushing for more details. What did her face look like. What did she say. What was she wearing. Was she scared. It seemed cruel, in a way— cruel to Jackson and cruel to Young, to have to listen to a report about Ginn proudly displaying her sneakers and pouring about half a cup’s worth of red paper flakes on her pizza, watching the pizza parlor’s staticky TV.

If it was only a game, then Ginn would have been an imaginary person. Now, Young thought, she might as well be. They would probably never see her again. It would be easy to forget she’d existed. That was the best option: not to think about what was happening to her now, four hours after her abduction— whether she was being cut to pieces in some Lucian hideout on Earth, or if they’d beamed her up right away and gotten the torture over with. Whether her little body was already floating in space.

His phone rang, and he glanced at it: Mitchell.

“Yeah,” he said, answering.

Mitchell said, “We found the van.”

“Ditched?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Nowheresville. Fucking— halfway to Pueblo.”

“You sweep the area?”

“V, I’m telling you, there is fuck-all here. We’ve got helos searching, boots on the ground, but it’s scrub brush. Flat as shit. Desert.”

Young shut his eyes. “Anything in the van?”

“Nope.”

“You must have missed something.”

There was a pause. Mitchell said, “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

“I’m not dragging you,” Young said. “I’m saying, there’s got to be something you missed. They must’ve had surveillance gear of some kind, listening devices, computers, _something_. How the fuck did they even know she was here?”

“I don’t know,” Mitchell said. He sounded ragged. “How the fuck do they know anything?”

“Yeah, well, that’s not an answer.”

Young hadn’t meant for his voice to get loud, but it had. He was aware that Jackson had stopped talking and turned towards him. Probably he wasn’t maintaining the protocol. No one got angry during a training exercise. That was the point. You learned to do it all without the fury, the terror, so that you could still do it later, when those things kicked in. 

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Mitchell said. “I mean, if you want answers, I can think of a pretty good one, but you’re not gonna want to hear it.”

Young braced himself against the streetlamp with an extended arm. “It wasn’t an op, okay, Cam? She was legit.”

“I’m just saying,” Mitchell said, “If I was gonna send somebody, I’d send somebody who’s going to make people want to not suspect her. _Her_. A girl. A kid. Big eyes, sad story—“

“Get back to me when you have something,” Young said shortly. He ended the call.

Across the street, a gaggle of drunk UC girls on their way home from some bar were laughing loudly. Blond hair, brown hair, sculpted into tousled waves. Their high shoes came in bright colors: red, pink, lime green. He couldn’t stand the fact that they were laughing. He hated them suddenly.

“What did Mitchell say?” Jackson asked carefully, inching into Young’s perimeter. He wasn’t in uniform, but then he never was, these days; all their emergencies happened after hours, just when they thought the last emergency was over.

Young sighed. He hadn’t moved out of his half-hunched posture, supporting himself with the lamppost. He’d never much been a pharmaceutical guy, but he wished now that he had a handful of uppers that he could use to balance out his pain meds, so that he could _take_ his pain meds, and not worry about fucking his judgment. Jesus. He just wanted to stand up. He wanted to _stand up_ , because he had to at least _look_ like a guy who could stand up.

In response to Jackson’s question, he said, “They found the van.”

“And?”

Young shook his head. He looked away to avoid Jackson’s scrutinizing expression. “I didn’t even know her,” he said. “Or like her, really. But I can’t believe she would— and _Rush_ , Rush liked her.”

“That isn’t necessarily an endorsement,” Jackson said. His face was hard to interpret. “Nick’s taste is… idiosyncratic. And not always helpful. Or healthy. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think she was in on it.”

“No?”

“It doesn’t feel like that clean an operation. Does it? I mean, it doesn’t to me.” Jackson frowned, staring at the two airmen, who were being checked out by medics. They’d been undercover and were wearing sweatshirts and jeans; they could’ve passed for the boys those UC girls had been meeting.

“It’s the stun,” Young said, following his gaze. It had bothered him too. “Why stun them? Why not kill them? It’s not like the Lucian Alliance are sentimental, and if you’ve already got the zat in your hand…”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Jackson agreed.

“Why leave behind witnesses? We’d’ve had nothing to go on; the civilians couldn’t even agree on what color the van was, and even if there was CCTV, all you have to do to lose it is jump right on the freeway.”

Jackson was still frowning, looking thoughtful. “Mitchell and his team are going over the van?”

“Yeah. They’ve got helicopters sweeping the area, guys running a grid on the ground— nothing so far.”

“That’s a lot of manpower,” Jackson said pensively. It seemed almost like a non sequitur, a stray observation. He looked like he was working his way up to saying more, but he was interrupted by the sound of Young’s phone.

Young sighed. “That’s probably Mitchell calling me back. I might have come pretty close to hanging up on him.”

But it wasn’t Mitchell, when he glanced down at the screen. It was Rush.

He squinted at the phone for a second, trying to make sense of this. “Who the fuck gave Rush a command code? Did you give him one?”

Jackson blinked at him. “For the phone network? No.”

“Then how the hell is he calling me from twenty floors down under the—“ Mountain, Young meant to say, but didn’t. His mouth stayed slightly open, waiting for a word it knew must be coming, though it no longer knew what that word was going to be anymore.

He and Jackson stared at each other.

Then Young was fumbling with the phone. “Rush? Rush, are you there?”

There was no one on the other end of the call.

“Nick, can you hear me?”

Jackson had his own phone out, and was speaking rapidly into it. “I need someone to locate Nicholas Rush. He has a room on Level 15—“

“He was in the infirmary,” Young said. “He was in the infirmary when I left, with Telford.”

Jackson’s eyes flickered to him. “He might be in the infirmary,” he said into the phone. “He’s equipped with a GPS tracker. If he’s not on base, you need to move to an _immediate_ Code Five. And I need a trace on a call.”

“Nick,” Young said again, into the phone.

He could hear nothing. Why could he hear nothing? His heart was racing. He didn’t think it had ever done that before. Inanely, he wondered: racing what? He’d never thought about it. But there must be something, something that it was trying to get ahead of.

“Yes,” Jackson said. “Immediate. Yes, it’s— Colonel Everett Young’s cellphone. It’s in the computer. It’s— Okay. Yes.” He covered the phone with his hand and said to Young, “Where’s your car?”

“Around the corner,” Young said. He couldn’t seem to bring himself to put the phone down.

Jackson gestured for them to head in that direction. “I’m on hold. They’re putting me through to someone who can run the trace.”

Young lurched away from the lamppost to follow. “It’s probably nothing,” he said. His hands, locked around the phone, felt numb. “It’s probably— it’s, if anyone could hack the system, it’d be— or— he’d get mad at me for saying that, hack, he hates that—“

Jackson didn’t say anything.

They got into the truck. Young hadn’t noticed how cold it’d gotten outside, but he guessed that made sense. It was October, and they were at altitude. Now that he was out of the wind, he felt how much warmer he was. But it only seemed to highlight the unsteadiness of his hands and the pain in his hip.

“Right,” Jackson said into his cellphone. “Okay. Yes. Colonel Everett Young’s cellphone. And did you— Right. I see.”

“What is it?” Young asked.

Jackson shook his head and motioned for Young to start the car. Young did so. The engine made its engine noises. He hadn’t been listening to music on the way here. He hadn’t thought about it. The last time he’d driven the truck had been when he took Rush to the Mountain. He wished there was music now, because it would feel real, and something about the situation didn’t feel quite real. It couldn’t possibly be happening, he thought. This wasn’t how it happened.

“Yes,” Jackson said. “South? South,” he said to Young. “South on 115.”

Young moved mechanically, setting the truck in motion and steering it east, towards the freeway. “It’s just ranches out there,” he said. “Ranches and hills and desert. A whole lotta nothing.”

“They’re tracing it. They’re trying to pinpoint the location,” Jackson said.

“What about Rush? He can’t have left the Mountain. Someone would’ve have to override his security status; he’s not cleared.”

“They’re still working on it,” Jackson said. His face was ghostly-white with the reflected sodium light of streetlamps as they sped along the long stretches of the freeway. He looked as grim as Young had ever seen him before. “They don’t have the manpower. They’re short-staffed because—“

“—everybody’s out here,” Young finished, feeling sick.

Jackson pressed his lips together. “As it happens.”

“Fuck. _Fuck._ ” Young slammed his hands against the steering wheel. “They’re out in the fucking _scrub brush_ with _flashlights—_ the airmen, they zatted the fucking airmen; they wanted them to tell us; they wanted us to find the van.”

“We don’t know that yet.”

“You were at a fucking _pizza parlor_ ; Mitchell was; I was; they fucking _played_ us!”

Jackson didn’t respond for a second. Then, sounding subdued: “Maybe drive faster,” he said.

Young did— seeing, soon, the stubbled shape of Cheyenne Mountain pass on his right, the farther-out mountains lost to the darkness.

Once they were past the Mountain, the traffic thinned. It was almost midnight, and 115 wasn’t an interstate. There was not the same sense of purposeful travel. The ranches that its little intersecting roads had been built to access were set, for the most part, far back from the road, and didn’t interrupt the profound sense of isolation. He didn’t ordinarily think of this stretch of freeway in those terms. In Wyoming, it would pass for heavily settled. But Rush, he thought, wouldn’t see it like that. It would be empty and dark and pitiless in the way that wild places could seem pitiless when you realized, for the first time, that they would not help you when you cried out to them for help. The huge indifference of nature was what startled and alarmed strangers to it. It was a wall that there was no pushing against.

“Yes?” Jackson said suddenly into his phone, jolting forwards as whoever it was he was speaking to returned. “Yes— okay. Send the coordinates to my phone. Did you— he did? Okay. Thank you. Yes. I’ll contact you as soon as we have more information.”

“They got it?” Young asked.

“We should be getting close to Wilderness,” Jackson said. “You're going to want to turn past there. One of the unmarked ranch roads. They’re sending the coordinates to my phone."

“What else did they say?”

Jackson looked away. But there was nothing to look at— only the flat road stretching out before them, and the shifting black patterns of desert grass that framed it on either side. “David signed Nick out of the Mountain,” he said. “He used his authorization.”

Young said, “That’s—“

He stopped. He didn’t know how to continue, because he didn’t know what it was. “Rush must’ve talked him into it,” he said. “Maybe David was taking him home. He’s got a soft spot for Rush; he let him use a computer earlier.”

He wanted Jackson to say, Yes, of course, what an incredibly reasonable explanation, or maybe, That’s exactly what I was thinking, too. He waited for the variation on one of these sentiments that was surely coming. But all Jackson said, after a tense beat of silence, was: “Here. Turn here.”

The road was barely a road: more of a scraped-out channel of chalky gravel leading up into the red-rock country of the canyons and hills. There were no lights along it, not even the distant flicker of lit ranch-house windows. Young turned on his high beams, which mostly served to make the landscape look bleached and unearthly. He saw a nervous deer, its eyes spooky in the reflected glow of the headlights. It shivered and then took off through the thicket in a tangle of spindly, imperiled legs.

“He was cleared,” he said— to Jackson or to himself. “David. Lam cleared him.”

“I know,” Jackson said.

“He wasn’t coerced.”

“I know.”

“So what you’re saying is— what you’re implying—“ Young was so angry, suddenly, that he couldn’t breathe right. The anger seemed to be eating a hole in his chest wall and causing his lungs to slowly collapse. Then it occurred to him that he wasn’t sure if it was anger. He just knew that he couldn’t breathe. It was the opposite of the numb feeling he’d had when he sat in the truck. He didn’t like it any better.

“I’m not implying anything,” Jackson said. “We’re both just stating a number of things that we know to be true. That’s all.”

“Bullshit, is that all. You’ve _never_ liked him; you’re running some kind of crusade against him; you’ll take _any_ excuse to get him out, you’re—“

“That’s not what this is,” Jackson said, raising his voice.

“David would _never_.” Young’s knuckles were white against the leather of the steering wheel. “Do you understand that? You weren’t there. You don’t know what they did to him, to— _shit!_ ”

Adrenaline hit as he slammed his boot against the brake pedal, swerving in a last-ditch attempt not to crash into a black Lexus sedan that was slanted across the narrow road, its nose crumpled against a tree. Young’s truck barely avoided it; he felt his seatbelt lock as he went off the gravel and into the red dirt, wheels rebounding wildly off roots and rocks and branches. He could smell burnt rubber when they finally came to a rest.

It took him a second to catch his breath. The high beams were still on, angled slightly upwards, and he stared at the ghostly tunnels of light that they excavated through the trees. Dirt churned up by the wheels was floating like little flecks of dust in them, eerie. The pine needles overhead looked black.

Jackson groaned.

“Are you okay?” Young asked.

“I’m used to Jack’s driving, so—“ Jackson peered owlishly at Young over his glasses. “Are _you_ okay?”

The question hadn’t occurred to Young yet. Mechanically, he took account of the searing line of pain that was creeping up from the base of his spine. He didn’t think it had been there before the not-quite-crash, but he’d been in a lot of pain already, so it was hard to tell. He was pretty sure he could still walk, and that was the operational question.

“Peachy,” he said.

Jackson looked doubtful. “Really?”

Young ignored the question. “That’s David’s car,” he said.

The Lexus still had its lights on. The driver’s side and passenger doors were open. Even at this distance, Young could hear the car’s automatic, insistent warning chime.

“David’s car,” Jackson said slowly, “and yet: no David.”

Young said tersely, “Does this match up with the coordinates the Mountain sent you?”

Jackson groped for the phone, which he’d dropped in the crash. The sudden light of the screen split the air. “More-or-less.”

“More-or-less; what does that mean, more-or-less?”

“I’d say within twenty feet of here.”

Young stared out at the car, calculating. “Are you carrying?”

“You mean, like— a gun? No. No!” Jackson looked appalled. “I’m a _civilian._ ”

“Stay in the truck.”

“Everett—“

Young kicked the truck door open and climbed down, reaching for his flashlight and sidearm. He ignored Jackson’s whisper— “Everett! _Everett!_ — and wished that Mitchell were here. Mitchell, with an M9 and an eye for tactical positions; Mitchell, who knew when to shut up in the field. But no: Mitchell was out in some stretch of fucking desert, hunting for a red-headed Lucian girl who might or might not have sold Rush down the fucking river.

He crouched behind the armor of the door and then, at what felt like an unpredictable-enough moment, swung out from behind it to scan the road. No one shot at him, which was a good start. He inhaled the scent of mountain pine and car crash. His boots crunched against the gravel as he advanced.

He had been certain before he got out of the truck that Telford’s car was empty, and a brief sweep with his flashlight established that this was correct. There was a black duffel bag in the backseat, next to Young’s copy of _The Brothers Karamazov._ Young pulled the duffel out, unzipped it, and took a quick glance. Telford’s wallet was sitting on top of some neatly folded shirts. He picked it up and flipped through it: ID, credit cards, insurance, social security. It didn’t look like anything had been taken. Telford almost never carried anything sentimental, or cash. Tucked in the very back of the wallet, where you’d expect a dollar bill to be, was a single stalk of yellow flowers from a chamisa. It was almost as flat and dry as paper.

There was nothing else in the car.

“It doesn’t seem like anyone’s going to shoot me,” Jackson’s voice said from behind him.

Young jerked around at the unexpected sound, bringing his gun up.

“—Except maybe you,” Jackson added. He had climbed out of the truck. He shut the door. The sound was explosive in a way that put Young on edge. “Sorry. I’m not very good at staying put. Maybe you’ve heard.”

“I’ve heard how it got us into the middle of an intergalactic war,” Young said shortly. “Maybe you should think about taking an online course or something.”

Jackson adjusted his glasses. “Right,” he said tightly. “Well— I’ll check out iTunes U as soon as we’re done here.”

“There could still be a sniper in the woods, you know.”

“I know.” Jackson touched the passenger door thoughtfully. “But I don’t think so. Something about this place feels… dead.”

Young slammed the backseat door closed. “Yeah,” he said flatly.

“I didn’t mean—“

“Call Mitchell, will you? Tell him to get his ass over here. “

“Everett—“

“I know what you meant,” Young said. He had crossed to the opposite side of the car and was looking at a set of drag-marks in the crushed white chalk. It wasn’t a clear enough track to know what had happened, but something had happened.

He dropped down to a crouch at the edge of the road to examine the flattened dust there, and then sprawled gracelessly onto his knees and hands as a wave of pain hit him. He held his breath for a second, squeezing his eyes shut and waiting for the feeling to pass. He always defaulted to counting, for some reason, in those excruciating ascents up the pain scale. He didn’t know why counting. Maybe he felt like that would control them somehow, or like they came with an in-built time limit, and all he had to do was outlast them. _1, 2, 3, 4_ —

There was something under his hand.

He sucked in an unsteady breath and shifted his weight so he could get a look at it. It was a brass button clinging to a broken navy thread.

He recognized it.

Behind him, Jackson was talking on the phone. “—crashed. No sign of Rush or Telford. Rush’s phone was pinging from this location, so we’re assuming he was here at some point, but that could be another decoy.”

“No,” Young said.

Jackson stopped talking to whoever it was on the phone— presumably Mitchell. “No?” he asked Young.

“He was here.” Young held up the button, directing the beam of his flashlight at it.

Jackson didn’t say anything.

Young tilted the flashlight down, at the bone-white gravel where he’d found the button. There was a dark stain on it.

He took out his phone, which still showed that he was talking to Rush. He ended the call and dialed back. Almost immediately, he heard the sound of a ringtone coming from somewhere up in the brushland. It was one of those default ringtones; Rush probably didn’t even know he had it programmed. Hell, Rush probably didn’t know the phone could _ring_.

The thought of Rush astonished by a ringing cellphone was so viscerally painful that he found himself counting to keep it away.

_1\. 2. 3. 4. 5._

He lumbered to his feet and made his way up the slope, heavy feet crushing the bleached-out autumn grass, boot-soles slipping on loose shale and tearing at pale patches of sagebrush, spilling a cool smell into the air that he associated with home. The red dirt looked dark under his flashlight. It reminded him of the dust on Sest Bet. Blowing everywhere, rattling in the canyons, choking the scarf he’d tied around his nose and mouth when he got there. David had said—

_1\. 2. 3. 4. 5._

Rush’s phone was half-hidden under the gappy, tangled-up root of a juniper tree. Young canceled the call and picked it up. When he pressed the navigation button, he saw Rush’s lock screen: the curving street lamp with its strange pattern. A leaping fish curled like a letter with a full-fledged tree sprouting from its back, a tiny bird at the top and a bell balanced from one of the branches. The sky behind it was gray. Rush had said, _I don’t like—_

_1\. 2. 3._

“Everett?” Jackson called from the road. “Did you find something?”

_1\. 2. 3. 4._

“Yeah,” he said. But the word came out hoarse and stifled. He cleared his throat. “Yeah.”

_1\. 2. 3. 4. 5._

He skidded down the slope to where Jackson was standing, looking worried.

“Mitchell’s on his way,” Jackson said. “They’re all on their way.”

Young held up the phone. “He must’ve—“ he said, and then his voice gave up on him again. “He must’ve thrown it from the road when he realized, when he—“

He looked down at the screen again. Dark, it was innocuous: just another ditched piece of tech. He hit the home button again and it lit up. Lamp, sky, fish, tree, bird, and bell— and stamped across them, half-obscuring the fish’s unreadable expression, a single smeared fingerprint in blood.

* * *

Mitchell’s team took the phone and set up searchlights, cordoning off the Lexus and processing it for clues.

Young sat in his truck with the door open, drinking a cup of gas station coffee from some place called, he noted with a bleak, remote amusement, the Wilderness Shoppette. He’d given in and taken the pain pills with some dexedrine slipped to him by Mitchell. There was nothing he could do here; it didn’t matter if his judgment was fucked. And he was curious, in a remote way, to see if he was capable of feeling something other than the raw and unrelenting press of an agony that seemed to indifferently combine the physical and mental, like it didn’t give a fuck where the line between them went.

Jackson, who had brought him the coffee, sidled up to him and leaned against the side of the truck. He didn’t immediately speak.

“David’s wallet was in the car,” Young said after a while. “So there’s still some chance that—“

“Yeah,” Jackson said quietly. “Yeah.”

“I saw the security camera footage from the base exit. They seemed fine. They seemed friendly.”

“Yeah. They did.”

Young covered his eyes with one hand. The white glare of the searchlights filtered through in splinters. He felt dazed. “I got him out,” he whispered. “I got him out, and he got _me_ out. I told him to leave me. And he wouldn’t. He’d lost so much blood. I just wanted him to stay alive, and he wouldn’t let me save him. He was joking about stuffed sopapillas. He was scared I was going to die. I wasn’t supposed to know that. But of course I knew.”

Jackson didn’t say anything.

“It was real,” Young said.

“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”

“No one’s that good of an actor.”

“I believe you,” Jackson said.

But of course he said that to everyone. _I believe you_. Full of endless patience. The pale blue eyes and the angelic hair. Just stuffed to his fingertips with sympathy for every person he encountered, regardless of whether or not they deserved it. It didn’t mean anything when it was dispensed like that. Young hated him suddenly, his limitless niceness and his cosmic wisdom.

“We got something,” Mitchell called from the vicinity of the car.

Young lurched forward, entering the searchlights’ full-force heat. He was aware of Jackson beside him, deliberately matching his pace. “Yeah?” he said, as he got close to the car’s splayed-out, open-doored bulk.

Mitchell was holding something cupped in one palm, peering at it with a flashlight angled down on it from above, like the white light of the perimeter wasn’t enough to show him the answer he needed. “Looks like Goa’uld tech,” he said. His face was tense. “A communicator, maybe. One of my guys found it in the forest. Ditched, he thinks.”

The object he held was small, round, and flattened like a coin, a deep bronze color, inscribed with a series of tiny hieroglyphs. In the center was a depressible dark red button, a little bit raised. The overall effect was of the miniature version of a DHD.

Young stared at it.

“I’ve seen this before,” he said.

Mitchell’s gaze sharpened. “Yeah? Did the Lucian girl have one when you brought her in? Or are we talking offworld?”

“No. No, I—“ 

The memory wasn’t there. It felt like something from a dream he’d had, Young thought. It seemed vivid at the time— strange, compelling, and painful. You wanted to see how it would end. But as soon as you woke it was gone, like smoke thinning out over the mountains until it was no longer smoke.

Like blood in water, ribboning into a thinner and thinner clothwork of lace.

Blood in water.

It had swirled in the barrel of the syringe. He had watched it while—

He reached out and touched the edge of the communicator. He could feel its unreadable ridge of letters under his fingertip.

Vaguely, he was aware that Jackson and Mitchell were waiting for him to answer.

“V?” Mitchell said.

“I— don’t know,” Young said.

There was a silence.

“You don’t know,” Jackson repeated.

“No.” But he did know. Or did he? It flickered. What did they call those things? Magic lanterns? No. That wasn’t the right term. There was one in a movie. A disc of paper with a picture on each side. You spun it and the two pictures seemed to come together. A man fled on horseback. A bird got locked in a cage. But you could never see the whole picture at once. Only pieces. “There was— a woman. She had it in her hand.”

Mitchell’s brow was creased, his face uncomprehending. “Who was the woman?”

The disc came with ribbons tied to each end. So that you could wind it up and keep it spinning.

“Kiva,” Young said.

“The head of Sixth House?” Mitchell looked even more confused. “When did you meet Kiva? Wait, was this classified?”

“I’ve never met Kiva,” Young said. It was starting to make him feel queasy, trying to force the pictures to be separate.

“I don’t understand,” Mitchell said.

“Cam,” Jackson said over Young’s shoulder, quietly.

“What?”

“ _Cam._ ”

“I don’t feel right,” Young said unsteadily. “I feel sick.”

“Here,” Jackson said. He hooked a surprisingly powerful arm around Young, and then Young was sitting. “Put your head between your knees.”

Young buried his face in his hands instead. He was sitting on the hood of the car, he thought distantly. It was cold. He could feel it through his uniform.

He imagined the paper disc spinning. He tried to keep the two sides of it apart in his head. “She said— she was holding the communicator and she said, _Make sure it’s out before they—_ “

_“Make sure it’s out before they scan you.” Kiva presses the communicator into Telford’s palm. She watches him in a narrow, predatory way that is both over-intimate and remote. “You do look delicious when you bleed, David.”_

“No,” Young whispered.

_“Make sure it’s out before they scan you.” Kiva presses the communicator into Telford’s palm. She watches him in a narrow, predatory way that is both over-intimate and remote. “You do look delicious when you bleed, David.”_

_Telford jerks away, turning his back to her. “Fuck off and leer at someone else. Don’t you have minions for that?”_

“Oh, Christ.”

_“Make sure it’s out before they scan you.” Kiva presses the communicator into Telford’s palm. She watches him in a narrow, predatory way that is both over-intimate and remote. “You do look delicious when you bleed, David.”_

_Telford jerks away, turning his back to her. “Fuck off and leer at someone else. Don’t you have minions for that?”_

_“But the fact that they’re my minions rather spoils the enjoyment.” She traces a line of sweat up his neck with one finger. He shivers. “Are you scared of me?”_

_“No,” David says shortly, and then makes a bitten-off pained sound as the knife digs into him._

_“I would’ve done the cutting myself,” Kiva says, peering over his shoulder clinically. “Or perhaps we could’ve gotten your friend to do it. I’m sure he’d be more than happy to, at this point. After what you’ve done to him.”_

“What I remember— that’s not— that can’t be real. That’s _not the way it happened._ ” Young shoved his hands against the sides of his head. “David was already— he was already hurt when they threw me in the cell. He was bleeding. He said—“

 _“I’m so sorry,” Telford whispers. His face is ashen. “I didn’t_   _  
mean to drag you into this. I fucked up. I fucked up, Everett._  
_The rest of the team’s dead, aren’t they?”_

 _“I’m so sorry,” Telford whispers. His face is ashen. “I didn’t_  
_mean for this to happen. I didn’t know it would be you, Everett._  
_I never wanted you involved. Why couldn't you just stay on Earth?”_

He was going to throw up.

_“It won’t hurt,” David says. His voice cracks. He swallows. He’s holding a needle._

_Blood swirls in the barrel of the syringe._

_It looks like smoke falling apart in the air over a mountain._

_It looks like someone’s unpicking stitches in lace._

His throat burned as he vomited over the side of the car.

Dimly, he was aware of Jackson’s hand gripping him at the juncture-point between his shoulder and his neck. It didn’t feel like comfort; it felt like Jackson was hanging on to him. Like Jackson was trying to stop him from going somewhere.

He wanted to go somewhere. Somewhere else. 

He imagined, for the space of a blind, unthinking half-second, shoving Jackson's hand off and running into the wilderness. Like an animal. It was hard for him to think of reasons why he shouldn't. He had never felt more like an animal, he thought.

“It’s okay,” Jackson said fiercely. “Everett. It’s okay.”

Young’s face felt wet. He wiped his mouth. But his eyes and nose were running; it was from the vomiting. “It’s not okay,” he choked out. “I brought him back. I _brought him back_. All along it was _him._ SG-3, everybody we lost in the incursion, they all—“ He couldn’t breathe. “Was he already— _before_ then? When— oh, fuck—“

And then he was throwing up again, but there was nothing in his stomach, so it was just bile, and all it did was hurt.

“You didn’t know,” Jackson said.

“I left Rush with him. How could I leave Rush with him?”

“You didn’t know,” Jackson said again.

“How could I not know? How could I not _remember?_ ” Young became aware that he was shuddering all over, convulsively, like he was freezing cold or sick. “There was blood on his phone,” he said. He could barely get the words out. “He was bleeding when he threw it into the trees. Rush.”

“We’re going to get him back.”

“Jackson,” Mitchell said in a low voice. He made some kind of gesture that Young didn’t catch.

“ _No_ ,” Jackson said immediately. “Absolutely not.”

“We have to bring him in. He’s compromised. Everett, we have to—” Mitchell looked at Young, appealing. He was holding a plastic zip-tie in one hand.

“I know,” Young said.

“He needs help,” Jackson protested vehemently. “He doesn’t need to be locked up like he's—“

“No,” Young cut him off dully. “He's right. Cam— bring me in. God. Fuck. You don’t know what the fuck else I could— What the fuck else I did— what did I—“

He couldn’t say it.

He took a long, shaky breath and pried himself off the car.

“You don’t have to do this,” Jackson said from behind him, sounding agonized. “Please don’t do this.”

Young looked at Mitchell. Mitchell’s eyes were warm and unyielding and absolutely ordinary. That had once been the most comforting thing about Mitchell to Young— how ordinary he was, in the face of everything that had happened to him. He’d fought space aliens flying a fighter jet over the white shelf of Antarctica, and been shot out of the sky, and had doctors tell him he’d never walk again. He’d come back from that and took General O’Neill’s place on the most famous team based out of the Mountain. And yet all of that seemed to wash off of him without changing him even a little. He was a rock of a person. And that had been comforting when Young hadn’t wanted to change. But now it scared him, Mitchell’s steadiness, Mitchell’s ordinariness. He thought that at last he had an inkling of how Rush must have felt, that day when Young told him how close he was to getting locked up for his own protection. _I won’t ever get out,_ he thought. _They won’t ever let me out._

And then he thought of Rush, sulking in the passenger seat of his truck, kicking a white mark against the dashboard. Standing beside the fence at Genesee, head tilted curiously, looking so small next to the huge animal whose nose touched his hand. He’d been so beautiful right then, and some part of Young had tried to crawl inside itself, to carve a space where that kind of beautiful thing could live, because he couldn’t stand to let it walk away. And it hadn’t. Rush hadn’t. He'd let Young hold him. He’d laid his head in Young’s lap like it was easy for him.

And Young had left him with Telford.

 _I don't know who I am_ , he wanted to say to Jackson.  _And you don't know who I am, either._

He closed his eyes. “Cam,” he whispered. “It’s okay. Do what you have to do.”


	36. Fugue, Pt. 1: A

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content warning** : I want to add a specific content warning for this section of the fic (the twelve chapters titled "Fugue"), which contains particularly intense depictions of physical, psychological, and medical violence, as well as elements of coercive sexual behavior. If you would like more information about any or all of this content, please let me know.

Rush opened his eyes.

He was a pattern of radiational excitation across the surface of a single dendritic appendage.

He was a series of waves with lengths located in the audible spectrum.

He was vibrating in the medium of the air.

“Nick,” someone said.

A set of phonemes.

People were staring at him.

Was something wrong?

The temporal ordering did not make sense. The temporal orchestration. Only a moment ago he’d had a boot on his back.

Hadn’t he?

He’d closed his eyes and—

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He was on a vessel in motion.

He could not move his hands or feet.

“Don’t panic,” Telford said. “You’re tied down till we reach the Icarus planet. Just try to— I said _don’t panic_. Stop it; you’re going to— Fine. Then I’m putting you to sleep.”

“No,” Rush said. “Don’t—“

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

“… voltage is what we theoretically predicted would be necessary, but the involvement of the implants complicates matters. The protein balance we’re trying to achieve is—“

He had been in this room before.

Hadn’t he?

"Nick,” Telford said. “You back with us?”

Was he?

“Back?” Rush said.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

His hands were knotted in his hair and he removed them because his head was aching.

“Think of it this way,” Telford said. “You don’t need to waste your time worrying about escaping. It’s not going to happen. So you have the advantage of being able to devote yourself fully to the actual matter at hand.”

“I’m not going to solve the cyphers for you, David,” Rush said. “Perhaps if you had asked nicely.”

“I didn’t bring you here to solve the cyphers.”

Rush eyed him sceptically. “Oh?”

Telford looked around the room. “Can we sit down and talk?” He gestured to the divans. “Like civilised people? I tried to get them to put together a room you wouldn’t hate— something that didn’t look like a prison.”

“We’re sitting,” Rush said flatly. “And I’m not a civilised person.”

“Fine. Then _I’ll_ sit.” He took a seat on the nearest divan, facing Rush. “You want a cigarette?”

Rush eyed him as he removed a box of American Spirits from his pocket, tapped two cigarettes out, and extended one to Rush. Rush did want a cigarette, very badly.There was a faint smell of tobacco from the open box; it promised to settle his stomach. He associated the scent— rich, brown, and earthy— with the disappearance of pain. When he did not immediately move forward to take the cigarette, Telford lit his own and blew blue smoke into the air: enticing.

“You can’t smoke indoors anywhere on Earth anymore,” Telford said, considering his cigarette’s glowing end. “Have you noticed that? Whenever people say I’m fighting for their freedom, that’s what I think about.”

“Is that what you think about,” Rush said.

His comment raised the tension in the room.

Telford smoked in silence for a moment and then said abruptly, “Just take the goddamn cigarette; I feel like I’m trying to lure a feral cat out of hiding. You can even have the pack, if you want. I can’t leave you the lighter, though. Security protocol. You understand.”

Rush, with bad grace, unfolded himself and crept forwards to take the cigarette. He allowed Telford to light it, holding it silently between two fingers and ignoring the proximity of their hands. After a slight hesitation, he accepted the neon-yellow packet as well, and slipped it into his blazer pocket.

When he retreated this time, it was to the far corner of the room. He backed himself into the sharp joint where the walls met, as far away from Telford as he could manage.

“I guess we can work on civilised behavior,” Telford said. “One step at a time.”

“Fuck you,” Rush said. The hand he held the cigarette with was shaking. “Why did you bring me here?”

“Because we need you, Nick,” Telford said. He sounded earnest. “The nine-chevron address— it’s the only shot we’ve got in this intergalactic shitstorm we’re in, the one chance for humanity to survive. It’s more than that. It’s— a chance to change things. A chance to fix things. Not just the war; everything, maybe. Make things better, make them _right_.”

“You said this wasn’t about the cyphers.”

Telford took a drag on his cigarette. He had an affected way of smoking, pinching the cigarette with two fingers in a way that Rush registered as defiantly working-class. “Jackson found an Ancient text buried in a repository on some backwater planet. It suggested that whatever lay beyond the nine-chevron address could only be accessed by a very special, very particular kind of person. Someone with a very specific genome. Someone with the ability to ascend.”

“Joke’s on you, then. I can’t fucking ascend.” The smoke from the cigarette was harsh on the back of Rush’s throat. The taste was ashy, familiar. His head steadied a little, but his hands continued to shake.

“No one can. No one has the right genetic makeup. But some people are… closer than others.” Telford eyed Rush meaningfully. “Closer to being Ancient. Close enough that, with a little medical work, some physiological alteration, we might be able to make one of those people meet the genetic requirements. One of the Goa’uld had come up with a process that more-or-less did this. But it was… unpleasant. A little bit Frankenstein-esque. The Lucian Alliance acquired research that allowed us to develop a procedure that was a little more fine-tunable. A little gentler. More refined.”

“More refined,” Rush repeated. He stared at the smoke rising from his cigarette, escaping from the burden of coherence into the open air.

“It’s perfectly— well, civilised,” Telford said with a faint smile. “I was hoping you’d cooperate with us, actually. You’ve always been open to expanding your boundaries a little. This is just one more way of pushing the limit. Think of it as an experimental drug protocol. A series of treatments that’ll gradually change the way your DNA acts.”

“As appealing as you make it sound,” Rush said, “I’ll pass.”

“At least give it some thought,” Telford said.

“Why not simply brainwash me?”

“We can’t risk damaging you. The process can have serious side effects, and we need your mind more-or-less intact for the genetic procedure.”

Rush said flatly, “Yes, God forbid you should damage me.”

He could not stop himself from thinking about those three conjoined words, _more-or-less._

“It’s nothing you can’t handle,” Telford said. “The— protocol. In fact, you’ve had the first injection already, and you didn’t even know it.”

Rush stared at him. “What?”

“I gave it to you the night that the Alliance attacked your apartment,” Telford said. ”There was a soluble compound coating the transponder encryption chip. You injected yourself with it in Young’s apartment. Remember?”

Rush felt himself attempt to recoil into the wall. The wall did not oblige him in admitting him to its material structure, and he did not understand why this was the case.

He felt betrayed by it. By the wall, he meant. He wished that he could communicate this profound and furious sense of betrayal. How dare you, he thought. Let me in. He did not want to be human. He did not want this soft and transpierceable flesh. He wanted to be a wall, and his molecules ought to oblige him; _Let me in_ , he thought to the wall again, hysterically. Echoes of Sheppard speaking to the doors of the courtyard. There was an expectation that they would hear, feel, know, that his desires had meaning, that they would let him in. _Let me in._ But between him and this wall there was no communication.

“It was a useful way to observe the initial effects,” Telford said. Give the man credit: he had the grace to sound at least slightly uncomfortable. “And it saved us time.”

Rush remembered the relentless sound that had followed him, the insinuating pitch of the E-flat—

Not-quite-E-flat—

Almost-E-flat—

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

The black ceiling of the room he was in had a thick print of hieroglyphics adorning the elaborate gilt flourishes that ran round its edge.

He was lying on a bed. The bed was wide and quite comfortable. It was dressed with a thick, soft, heavy, dark-blue duvet that felt voluptuous under his fingers.

He had been unconscious, he thought. Someone had removed his belt, his socks, and his shoes. They had not removed his clothes or the transmitters he wore.

He sat up slowly, feeling muzzy-headed and ill.

He was alone in the room, which he had not expected. He supposed that somewhere a camera was keeping an eye on him.

Where was he?

He did not know where he was. He wanted to know where he was. Not that it made a material difference. It did not make a material difference, obviously. But he wanted to know where he was and he did not like that he did not know where he was; he felt—

Dislocated.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

His dilating blood vessels hurt.

Whatever they were injecting him with—

Who was they?

When had he been injected?

He felt sick.

He said, “I feel sick.”

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He had drawn his legs up under him on the divan. He raised his gaze from the glossy floor, and— balancing an elbow delicately against the armrest— rested his chin in one hand.

He considered the fact that no trace of the fire he had set was visible on the floor. He wondered how long he had been unconscious. This was starting to disturb him: his inability to track time. There were these ellipses, and he did not know how many words went in them. The text was missing, like a Grecian fragment.

Or _was_ the text missing? Sometimes the text seemed to have been translated in the wrong order. A graduate student had gotten it garbled, or the accepted version was incorrect.

“But you see,” he said absently to Telford, “I like starting fires. And I don’t particularly like cooperating.”

Telford turned away with a forceful huff of breath. “You know, fire-starting is one of the symptoms of psychopathy. Does that worry you at all?”

Rush smiled faintly, without any humor. “I would be more worried,” he said, “if I had fucked someone and then ensured that his back was broken. I assume that this is, after all, the actual narrative of what occurred.”

He had thought that this might at last cause Telford to hit him, but Telford seemed to be currently exercising a disappointing amount of self-control. He merely faced Rush, smiling in a tense and highly compressed way. “Are we talking about Young?” he said. “I thought we weren’t talking about Young; I thought that was the point of your little bonfire. Wasn’t it? So you wouldn’t have to talk about Young. A big temper tantrum because it turns out your boyfriend really only ever liked your laboratory potential.”

Rush maintained the same very faint smile. “I suppose at least I have the consolation,” he said, “that, in spite of what you think, we weren’t fucking. It’s irrational, I know, but it seems so much crueler to me the other way. So much more personal. To touch someone like that, to see them in the grip of something so naked, and then— It takes a special kind of pretense. Did you enjoy that? I suppose you must’ve. He was so stupid. So helpless. He broke a mirror when he thought you’d died. And all the time you were laughing at him. Did you break the bones yourself? You know, I never got to see the scars; I understand they’re quite extensive. I assume you—“

The flat of Telford’s hand crossed his face like a whip-crack. It knocked his head back. Rush inhaled sharply: a sound of satisfaction. The pain followed, a beat late.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

The obsidian floor was cool against his hot forehead. He was shivering and sweaty. He felt sick.

With a wanting that seemed to travel a very long distance from its welling-up point in the soles of his feet, he wanted Young to sit down beside him and stroke his hair back. Dry rough comforting fingertips as yet untutored in the arts and crafts of tenderness. Things would be better if Young were there. He felt certain.

“Why aren’t you here?” he whispered. “Why aren’t you _here?_ ”

He could not remember the answer.

And then he did not want Young there and he did not know why.

Young had done something terrible.

Did Rush know that yet?

How, if he did not know that, would he know that? Why, if he did not know that, would he press his clenched fists against the floor and then spread them open, fingers digging painfully at the stone, as though he could claw his way under it and away from the agonizing knowledge?

He imagined it: a cold, dark, and silent place without electrodes or needles, where he would not need to know. Or be known.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

“What?” he asked vaguely.

“I said yes,” Telford said. “You already asked me that. She’s alive.”

“Oh,” Rush said.

His eyes drifted half-closed. He was so tired. He was tired all the time now.

The way his mouth tasted made him think he had been sick at some point in the recent past. This might have been helpful in terms of temporal sequencing, except for the fact that he suspected he was sick rather a lot these days.

“David,” he said, “do you ever think about pyrolysis?”

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He’d had the palms of his hands pressed to them. He did not like this. He felt dislocated.

He was in a room with bronze walls, somewhat irregularly shaped. Its floor mirrored the polished black ceiling. The dim light that filled it was projected from a series of wall sconces intended to convey the impression of flames. In roughly the centre of the geometrically unsatisfying space stood a large shallow bowl filled with black rocks from which emerged another facsimile of firelight. Presumably one was meant to recline upon one of the low divans provided and enjoy the imitation.

The room was very quiet. The artificial fire produced cosy snapping sounds, exactly as a non-artificial fire would.

Rush placed his bare feet on the obsidian floor and stood unsteadily. The floor was cold. His head ached rather badly. He recalled Telford slamming it into the ground in Colorado, so he supposed it would. That was what had happened before he became unconscious. Wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

He felt dizzy.

He was not frightened because he did not become frightened. This was not a rule he had; it was simply a quirk of his mode of being. He lacked the limbic apparatus necessary for it. He did not feel fear; he did _not_. He did not feel afraid, and he _certainly_ did not feel afraid when facing the threat of violence, because frankly there was nothing more pathetically simple to survive. In fact he quite liked violence. It was well-defined and easy. He could do violence all fucking day. He fought the impulse to turn towards the camera— to turn in a circle, facing down all possible positions of cameras— and invite them, _them,_ whoever it was, the Lucian Alliance, who was watching, to enter already so they could get it over with.

And perhaps this confrontational affect communicated itself in spite of his admirable restraint in not doing so, for a previously unseen door hissed open then and Telford entered.

“You—“ Rush said in a cracked voice, and then, rather than waste time enumerating Telford’s deficient personal qualities, opted to hurl himself at the man and tackle him to the floor.

Telford went down chiefly because he was overbalanced. Rush was much smaller, and untrained, and sick, and what ensued was less a fight than Rush sitting on Telford’s chest and punching him in the eye. Then he found himself, rather unexpectedly, flat on his back and winded. He stared up at the gilt ceiling. His head hurt.

“Cut it out,” Telford told him. He was holding Rush’s wrists pinned.

“Fuck you,” Rush bit out and tried to kick him. “Let go of me. Let go of me, _let go of—_ “

“I just want to talk to you. Can I just talk to you for a minute?”

Rush attempted to dislocate his own shoulder in an effort to escape Telford’s grasp.

Telford sighed. He jerked Rush’s wrists painfully together so that he could grip them one-handed, and reached into a pocket with the other hand. The hand came out holding a needle. “I’ll stop drugging you if you stop being a jackass,” he said.

“Why should I trust you?” Rush said viciously. But his breath had gone ragged. He did not want to be sedated again. He could not fight if he was sedated; he could not act; he was not a _person_ ; he was only a body, and he, the person, would have to return to that body with no control over what had been done to it, and that thought caused him to push and push against Telford’s hand and the knees that were pinning his thighs to the floor and he could not _breathe_ ; his vision was a sunflash, and Telford said, “Sorry, but it’s just easier this way,” and took the cap off the needle with his bared teeth and then there was the pain as the needle slid in.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

The gravity was strange. He was in space, he thought. He had never been in space before.

He didn’t like it. He decided he would rather not be in space.

“Not this again,” Telford said.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He had dreamt about Young, he thought.

If he had been asleep. It was difficult to say for certain.

After all, what was a dream? A shuttling-through of neuronal activation. A Bonfire Night that the brain puts on for itself.

 _Remember, remember the Fifth of November_ —

Roman candles. Catherine wheels. He had not wanted to know that she was dead. No. He had not wanted to know that she was dying.

In the dream it had been Young who was dead. Unless Young was dead. He thought that on balance it was likely that Young was not dead and that he had only dreamt of burning down Young’s apartment, setting the hated sofa on fire whilst Young’s body was lying in state upon it. This did sound like something he might do, but he could not think when he would have had the opportunity.

It no longer hurt to think about Young. Perhaps because he was dead.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

“Careful,” he said when he could speak. His ears were still ringing.

Were his ears ringing?

Was that the sound he could hear?

He wished Telford would hit him again so he could check.

He inspected his lip to see if it was bleeding. It wasn’t. He smiled unpleasantly at Telford. “I thought you said the Lucian Alliance wanted me undamaged.”

Telford’s expression didn’t change. He seized a fistful of Rush’s hair, snarling his fingers in it, and used it to haul Rush off of the divan. Rush made a cut-off sound of pain, and then another as his knees hit the floor. His hands scrabbled against the smooth obsidian, trying to find leverage. It hurt, because road had left his hands scraped raw. Rush gritted his teeth. This hurts, he thought to himself. He concentrated on it. This is what it feels like to hurt. His eyes watered. The feeling was excruciating and exactly what he had wanted, clean and distinct and overwhelming, like a cold sea coming in. It had temporality and it would leave a mark.

That was important.

Why was it important?

He couldn’t focus.

He would see the bruises. He would touch his aching scalp and know what had caused the damage. He would know why he was damaged.

He couldn’t focus.

“You’re— _hurting_ me,” he forced out, breathless, as he kicked blindly through tears of pain. It was a stupid, obvious sentence for him to state. Subject verb object stating the evident. You’re _hurting_ me. But he wanted to shout it and make sure that someone heard it. Saying it was performative, maybe. It was a necessary speech act. If he did not say it, it would not be real in some way, and it was real, it was _real_ , and someone ought to have to hear it; there should be a fucking notary public holding a metal fucking stamp, and then it would be official and he would be hurt and this would be what had hurt him.

“Get on the bed,” Telford said, jerking him towards the item of furniture in question.

To which the correct strategic move was to laugh. “Christ, I should’ve known you’d like it rough. I suppose I’m up for it if you are.”

That made Telford release him abruptly, causing him to overbalance and land heavily on his elbows. “I’m not interested in fucking Young’s rejects,” Telford bit out.

“When you put it that way—“ Rush pried himself up, wincing. “Well, actually, no. I find the idea quite interesting.”

Telford paced away, his hands gripped into fists at his sides, and returned. “On the bed,” he said shortly. “Or I’ll put you there.”

“Do please put me there. I think I’d like that.” Rush fixed him with a deliberately daring look. _I don’t believe_ , the look said, _that you are man enough to do this, but I certainly want you to do it, so when it comes to winning this confrontation, there is quite simply nothing you can do._

He wasn’t disappointed: Telford got a fist in the collar of his blazer and dragged Rush up to his knees, giving him a good hard shove towards the bed. Rush managed to hook a foot around his ankle so that they both fell, and they landed together, tangled. Telford seemed surprised by this strategy for some reason, which exposed the simplicity of his thinking. He stared down at Rush. He was lying half on top of him, balancing on his elbows.

“You are unbelievable,” he said.

Rush stretched as luxuriously as he could, in spite of the weight of Telford on him and the fact that every part of his body ached. This brought him into contact with new and interestingly solid parts of Telford, who hadn’t moved. “What is it you find so unbelievable?” he asked, arching his eyebrows. “That Young would want to fuck me? He did, you know, though. _He_ was _certainly_ up for it.”

“Shut up.”

“I suspect I could’ve had him already, if I hadn’t—“

He was cut off by Telford’s mouth coming down on his. The kiss, if it was a kiss, was bruising: a brutal pressure that drove Telford’s teeth into his lips, and his lips against his own teeth. It hurt, and Telford was driving the air out of him with an arm across his ribcage, forcing new air into him via the gasping breaths they shared, the hot damp intermingled breaths that were too short to really let either of them breathe, so that Rush very rapidly began to feel lightheaded.

“He was playing you, you know,” Telford managed to get out, without moving his mouth away from Rush’s. “Keeping tabs on a fucking scientific asset. Talk about under his thumb; he had you under his _dick_.”

Rush dug his fingertips into Telford’s back. “He didn’t, but he could’ve. He would’ve liked it. I would’ve made it good for him.”

“Yeah?” Telford got a hand in Rush’s hair again, not much more gently this time. “You gonna make it good for me?”

“Is that what you want? You want me to be good?” Rush closed his eyes and made an inadvertent noise as Telford pulled his head back.

“Yeah,” Telford said. “That’s what I want.” His tone of voice was odd, wavering. He was not quite keeping up with the game. He brought his cheek in close against Rush’s. His skin was very warm, with only the faintest burr of stubble. “Why can’t you just be good? Just be good, Nick.”

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He stared, unseeing, down at the smooth black surface of the floor. He could see his own reflection. It was ghostly. Glassy. It had no perceptible affect.

 _For now we see through a glass darkly_ , he thought. _But then: face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known._

“I—“ he said.

Had he already said this?

He wasn’t sure suddenly. A wave of dizziness swept over him.

“What, he didn’t tell you?” Telford asked. He had already known that this was the case, of course. Or he would not have so skilfully delivered the blow.

“I—“ Rush said again, stupidly, because he felt that if he did not say something, he would lose ground in a very complicated battle that he could not afford not to win. But he had no sentence prepared in which he, he himself, in pronoun form, was the subject, and in fact for an astounding moment he felt that he was _not_ the subject, that he was not _a_ subject, that he had dispersed like a murmuration of starlings or a swarm of wasps, and each bird-insect-unit had taken a piece of his cognition with it, so naturally it was quite difficult for thoughts to cohere in a timely fashion.

The wasps that had been him buzzed in the room’s dark corners, where they had taken shelter.

He raised a restless gaze because he could not stand to look at his own reflection. He found that it fixated on a single gilt ornament on the top of a far wall. There was no particular reason for his gaze to fixate there and he had no observations to offer about the ornament. He simply found himself unable to focus on any other object or person in the room.

“No pillow talk about his plans to fry your brain?” Telford pursued relentlessly. “‘Nick, by the way, I’ve been meaning to tell you, I’m the head of this committee that exists for the sole purpose of experimenting on you.’ None of that?“

“Of course he told me,” Rush said, because that was the correct thing to say. The correct return sally. He could not allow Telford to know that he had scored a hit. His voice had taken on a strange quality. It was as flat and thin and edged as a knife that could cut through anything, even atoms. He swallowed again.

Telford studied him. A measure of the triumph had faded. He seemed to have found it did not agree with him. “Right,” he said quietly. “Of course he did.”

“He told me,” Rush whispered. He cleared his throat and said louder: “He told me. He isn’t like you; he wouldn’t _not tell me_ something of that nature.”

“I’m telling you,” Telford said. “Aren’t I? I’m being straightforward. I’m coming to you. I want us to collaborate on this.”

Rush found, to his surprise, that his knees would no longer support him. Possibly the sedative that he had been dosed with had not wholly worn off. That was the most likely explanation. He felt light-headed and, with the wall against his back, he slid to the floor. He sat there somewhat limply with his hands resting in his lap. He wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. He felt immensely tired, and that, again, was probably the sedative.

In an abstracted voice, he said, “Tell me, is Ginn alive?”

“Yes,” Telford said.

“May I see her?”

“No.”

Rush nodded slowly. He stared at the black floor. It seemed to be full of liquid shapes that moved just below the surface. But he knew they were only reflections, the never-quite-fully-formed echoes of objects in the real world.

The real world.

 _Now_ we see through a glass, darkly. But _then_ : face to face.

Something about this struck him as important. But he could not force it to cohere out of formlessness. Attempting to do so made him feel nauseated

Even moreso than he had been.

He said, “I think I’d like to be alone now.”

“… Right,” Telford said. “I’m sorry I had to be the one to tell you all of this. I get it. It’s hard when people aren’t who you thought they were.”

“There’s nothing to get,” Rush said mechanically.

Telford stood, straightening his uniform, and ashed his cigarette into the bowl of dark stones. “I’ll give you some time to think it over. Someone’ll bring you some food later. As much as I regret it, you obviously can’t leave the room.”

“Obviously,” Rush said, without looking at him.

Telford said, “This doesn’t have to be unpleasant. It really doesn’t. I don’t want it to be unpleasant.”

“David,” Rush said in the same flat, perfectly polite voice, “please get the fuck out.”

Telford did.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He was a path of electricity travelling through organic matter.

He was the climbing fiber activation in a Purkinje cell that culminated in a complex spike.

He was arborescent.

He was his own unbecoming.

He had no existence because he was a particle and a wave and he was dependent upon being _brought_ into existence by the universe’s experimental apparatus and he was dependent upon being brought into existence over and over and over again—

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

There was a woman. She looked at him strangely.

He had said something, he thought. He had just finished speaking. He could sense it through his attunement to some microtremor in the air.

Surely it was her turn to speak, and he regarded her in expectation.

She had very long dark hair, tightly pinned, and eyes like chips of basalt. He was reminded of a black swan, but a particularly vicious specimen. It was something about the way she held her head.

“You already know my name,” she said.

But he didn’t.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He was in the bronze-walled room, lying on the bed.

He felt sicker than he had done before. His head was pounding. It felt hollow and resonant, like a drum that had been hit and was still abuzz.

He curled in on himself, hugging his knees, and then wished that he had not done this, because he saw that Telford was sitting and watching him from the far end of the bed.

“Hey, Nick,” Telford said. “Don’t hit me this time, okay?”

Rush was, quite frankly, too physically wretched to be arsed to do it. He said nothing. He sat upright and pushed himself away from Telford, retreating towards the wall.

“I’m glad you’re awake,” Telford offered into the silence.

“Are you?” Rush asked, with a barbed and queasy scepticism. “I seem to remember you drugging me a number of times.”

Telford sighed. “I’m sorry. And I’m sorry you got hurt. That wasn’t supposed to happen. You’re very resistant to sedatives, as it turns out.”

Rush pulled his knees up to his chest. “Ah. Well, that’s me told, then. How silly I feel for complaining.”

“Look, can we just—“ Telford rubbed at an eyebrow with his thumb. “I was hoping that maybe we could have that rational conversation I mentioned. But if you’re not ready to do that—“

“Where am I?” Rush asked.

The question seemed to catch Telford off guard. “What?”

“Where am I; where the fuck did you take me?”

Telford looked down and away, then back. “Not on Earth.”

“I see,” Rush said. He absorbed the words. They were not news; he had guessed their content already. Telford had mentioned something to that effect during the long stretch of queasy and intermittently interrupted blankness that constituted the most recent span of Rush’s memories. And the room did not feel as though it were on Earth. This was not an observation that was quantifiable, yet nevertheless something in Rush’s gut persisted in making it: something is wrong here.

Something is wrong here. Like the gravity that had been strange. Was strange. Was going to be strange.

He knotted his hands in his hair and closed his eyes.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He stared at the wall without really seeing its gauche bronze colouration.

 _Why aren’t you here?_ It was a stupid question. Or: let us say: badly-framed. If a question does not have an answer then it has been framed badly.

The fact was that she was not here, and therefore he would have to cope with his stumbling, aphasic feelings, and therefore the best course of action was probably, well, action. Action. Because he could not continue being like this. It was intolerable. He had to—

 _Do_ something.

But what?

He considered that perhaps he was queasy and should throw up. But this did not seem very effectual and he was not certain that he was queasy.

He considered saying to Telford, Let’s fuck, and fucking Telford. That option was appealing. He was certain that Telford would be very good in bed. Not that it particularly mattered whether he was or he wasn’t.

He considered kicking and clawing at the door that Telford had gone through until he bled or broke a bone in his foot or someone came to restrain him. This option also had its charm. However, it seemed likely to require a large amount of energy, an amount larger than Rush could currently summon.

Overall, he judged the first option to be the least promising. The third: moreso. The second rated very highly, in no small part because of its potential for ongoing satisfaction, but it would— tediously— require Telford’s assent, and Telford would undoubtedly think that the proposition was a part of some convoluted strategic manoeuvre, which it would be, though it would also be an honest proposition.

Having thus considered the courses of action available to him, Rush settled upon a fourth option, which was to heave the duvet off the bed, strip the pillowcase and sheets, form a careful heap of all these fantastically flammable-looking items, and set them on fire with his cigarette.

It took a great deal of work; the cloth did not immediately want to catch light. He felt immensely proud when at last it did and the flames spread— _real_ flames, not the pale green artificial projection that populated the bowl of stones. These were hot flames with blue at the centre, volatile and furious. They were flames that ate everything they touched. They turned it to ash. Rush was rather curious to observe the path that their appetite would chart throughout the stone-and-metal of the alien room, but, alas, they were still chewing determinedly at the duvet, producing a strong smell of singed feathers, when Telford arrived to stick a needle in him again.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

“He’s seizing,” someone said.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

His eyelids felt heavy, like the drooping curves of waves on the ocean. They wanted to fall. They wanted not to exist. They wanted him not to exist.

Did he exist?

He was not sure.

“We tried it your way,” a woman’s voice said. Strident, accented. “I indulged your distaste, your weakness. Made allowance for your cultural taboos.”

“Strategically, cooperation was the best option.” That was Telford. “It still is the best option, to be honest.”

“It’s no longer an option.”

“He could be dangerous, if this works.”

“It is equally true that if this works there could no longer be a _him_.”

Rush had a vague awareness that _he_ was the him. He had never considered himself dangerous, but he was interested in the possibility of it. He was equally interested in not existing. He was not entirely sure to what extent he existed now. He seemed to be tethered to his body by some slim percentage of himself. It was rather relaxing; he did not particularly want to be in his body. The last time he had been in his body—

He couldn’t remember what had happened the last time he had been in his body.

Or he was suffering from a different problem altogether.

But what was the nature of the problem?

He must have made a sound.

“Nick?” Telford’s face came into view.

Rush blinked slowly. The world seemed filled with halos emitted by a thousand unseen suns. “Why’m I,” he said. The words were slurred. “So.”

“We gave you something to make you a little easier to deal with.”

“I don’t. Like.”

“Just relax,” Telford said. He brushed a strand of hair out of Rush’s face. “We’re running some tests. It’s nothing to worry about.”

Rush did not feel worried, but he felt that he probably ought to feel worried. He felt that he probably ought to feel frightened, even. He frowned anxiously up at the glinting, strangely-angled world he could see. Perhaps he was not frightened, he thought, because he did not become frightened. This was not a rule he had; it was simply a quirk of his mode of being. It was. Wasn’t it? And anyway it was difficult for him to identify emotions; it always had been. But he felt _something_ ; usually, he felt something, not this soft-edged nothingness. Didn’t he? He made another wordless sound, restive and searching.

“Is he going to cause trouble?” That was the woman’s voice. He could not see her.

Telford was briefly visible through the curtain of little coronal scrapings. He placed a warm hand on Rush’s forehead. “Not anymore,” he said.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

There was a light overhead and he felt he could understand its pulses, its sympathetic and interpretable sinusoidal waves. He listened to it.

The most beautiful thing about light was that it did not leave you.

The body absorbed it. Energy was transferred between objects. You did not have to repay it; you did not have to give it back.

Really this was true of any electromagnetic radiation. Music. Warmth.

You didn’t _keep_ it, though, that radiation. It turned you into a different person. It pummelled, assaulted, bombarded you; it incorporated itself into your being; and then it ceased to exist and you ceased to exist and what was left in the world was something else entirely.

He was not sure if he was comfortable with this.

“But everything else goes away,” he said.

Or tried to say. He was not sure if he said it. The nervous system was not behaving according to design at that point. Electricity rebooted his synapses, causing organic material to malfunction as impulses were transmitted in incorrect ways, and after a long time had passed and the electricity had ceased to startle him into being again and again, someone switched off the light or else he closed his eyes and—

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He could taste blood in his mouth. For a dislocated moment he thought that Telford had hit him. But of course Telford had not hit him. Or Telford had hit him but that had been—

When?

Telford had hit him and then Telford had put his boot on Rush’s back and then—

No.

Telford had hit him and then—

Now Telford was kissing him, more or less: a hot hand in his hair, wrenching his head into the right position, and mouth working devouringly at him.

“If—“ Rush said, and had to work to locate the thread of the conversation. “If _that’s_ what you want, I’m afraid you’re going to have to work for it.”

Telford’s response was to kiss him even more devouringly, like he could break down the boundaries between their two kinds of flesh if he simply forced Rush’s mouth to open under his, if he made his lips and tongue and gasping breath into the right shape of key. He worked the hand that was not in Rush’s hair up under Rush’s shirt. Rush shivered; he couldn’t help responding. Telford was so warm, and he was so cold, and no one had touched him like that in such a long time.

Not even—

He didn’t let himself think it.

Telford was nosing at his jawline, kissing down his neck. His hand pushed Rush against the bed, shoving a path up the bony line of his ribcage before finding a nipple and taking it between toying fingertips in a way that made Rush genuinely arch his back. Rush wondered for an absent moment how much difficulty he would create for himself if he actually let Telford fuck him. He thought it was hard to say. He didn’t yet know, after all, what it was that Telford needed him for, so—

No. That was wrong. He did know.

Fuck. He had to _focus._

“Yes,” he whispered into the rumpled mass of Telford’s hair. “That’s good. Let me— Let me up. I’ll suck your cock.”

Telford made a thoughtful noise.

“You can pull my hair while I do it.”

It took Telford a long time to respond. Finally he sighed, and let his head drop against Rush’s collarbone. The energy seemed to have gone out of him. “I’d really like that, Nick,” he said in a tone of regret. “But the thing is, I think that, unfortunately, the minute I’m on my back, you’re going to make a break for that door over there.”

Rush went still.

“Or, who knows; if I’m lucky, maybe you’d actually suck me off first.”

“Fuck you,” Rush said, low and vicious, and drove a knee, clumsily, into Telford’s stomach. It did the trick, more-or-less; he had to wrestle free of Telford’s grasp, and he didn’t hit the ground running so much as spill off the bed and have to clamber up again, but then he was heading for the door, groping for a handle, pounding his fists against it, trying to get it to open, open, _open._ He wheeled to face Telford, who had shifted to watch Rush, head propped against his hand. “Open it,” he demanded.

Telford shook his head. “Not one of your better-thought-out plans. What were you going to do, even if it opened? How’re you getting off this planet? It’s not like you can fly a ship.”

Rush levelled a ferocious kick at the door. “ _Fuck_ you!”

“For the record,” Telford said, “I only fuck people who want it.” He picked himself up off the bed and stretched lazily. “And Young wanted it, you know. With me, it wasn’t an act.”

“You bastard,” Rush said. His voice came out thin and choked and murderous. He wished for better control of himself, as he always had done; he wished to not be subsumed by great tidal surges of physical sensation, making his blood pressure drop and his ears buzz. But all he could do was shudder and slam the flats of his hands against the door and say, “You bastard, you _bastard.”_

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

“—understand the theory,” someone was saying. “Chemical changes are actuated in the body, and the electricity has two functions. First, we use it to inscribe these changes at the protein level. However, a separate step involves creating new pathways in the brain. The brain has to remember how to do things it’s never learned to do.”

Remember.

“Like a child downloading a program for walking. Only it’s a program for being an Ancient. A program for doing whatever it is the Ancients did.”

Remember, remember the fifth of November.

He had walked out into the garden.

Gloria had gone to bed.

 _I am dying_ , her breath had said.

He had not wanted to remember.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He was lying on the same bed, which was now conspicuously lacking its bedclothes. His fingers curled against a plain mattress. The reminder of his small but determined fire sent a surge of quiet satisfaction through him.

Telford was leaning against the far wall. His expression was thunderous; he looked as though he would like to hit Rush. He showed no signs of doing it, however, which Rush found disappointing. Instead, he crossed his arms and said, in a flat and controlled voice, “I’m sure there’s a piece of mature and sophisticated thinking behind that little escapade. After all, you’re a genius, right, Nick? So: let’s have it. Break it down for me.”

“Well, you see, David,” Rush said, wincing and touching his head as he sat up, “to put it in layman’s terms: fuck you.”

“Nice. That’s great. That’s very classy.” Telford’s jaw worked.

“I’m pleased you think so.”

“You know, I told Kiva that you were a reasonable person.”

“There are a number of people who might have advised you that that was a mistake.”

“You’re really going to reject my offer just to spite me?”

Rush considered. “It certainly seems possible,” he said. “I suppose I’m not entirely clear on what your offer _is_.”

“You volunteer to help us,” Telford said. “Instead of making your own life harder. It’d be so much easier if you just agreed to cooperate.”

“Cooperation isn’t part of my skill set,” Rush said.

“Look, I’m offering you what you want,” Telford said. For the first time, he sounded irritated. “I’m giving you the chance of a lifetime. We have no idea what might be possible once we dial the ninth chevron. What we might be able to discover; what we might be able to do. And you’d be right at the centre of it.”

“Along with the Lucian Alliance.”

Telford made a frustrated gesture. “Does it matter who with? Power is power. You do what you want with it. And it’s not like there’s anybody on Earth you give a shit about, or who gives a shit about you.”

Rush stared down at the glossy floor. “No,” he said. “I suppose there isn’t.”

“It’s not a bad thing. It’s freedom. Loyalty is sentimental; it holds you back. Who are you without the barriers people put in front of you, the claims they make on you, the leashes they put around your neck? Who _could_ you be? I know you’ve wondered. I know you’ve _wanted_ it.” There was something dark and hard about Telford’s tone now. He had leant forwards towards Rush, intent, as though they were about to share some intimacy. “So stop setting the room on fire, or whatever the hell you had up your sleeve next, just because you can’t admit what you want.”

“Your understanding of my interior landscape is,” Rush said, the corner of his mouth jumping in a suppressed tic, “as ever, rather offensively thin.”

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

“It saved you time,” he said almost soundlessly.

He had heard a noise, that night. He had been aware that something was trying to tune him, that he was being acted upon by a force he did not know, a force that _waited_ and _wanted_ and was and was-not in a state of ontological malfittedness that mirrored its inability to fit into conventional musical tones. The people around him had thought he was going mad. They had thought he was unstable. David had sat on the floor of his kitchen, holding a Rubik’s Cube in his hands, and he had said: _Your ears were ringing._

It was the lie that made Rush feel sick.

No. It was the lab-rattiness of it all.

The animal quality.

He wanted to bare his teeth, like animals did.

Instead he raised a hand and touched one of the two tiny humming machines affixed to his forehead. “It was an experiment,” he said, half to himself. “It was all an experiment.”

“I didn’t know about the effect the eighth cypher would have.” Telford looked genuinely apologetic. “I assume you wouldn’t have been able to solve it without the genetic augmentation, so overall I’m sure you’d agree that’s a win, but the seizures were unexpected. We can play around with the balance, see if they disappear in later levels of the procedure.”

“How kind of you,” Rush said flatly. “You _bastard.”_ With an abrupt and furious jerk of his arm, he flung his lit cigarette at Telford. “You _bastard_ , you’ll _play around with the balance?_ You want my _cooperation?_ I’m not a fucking _rabbit_ in a cage! You don’t get to _inject_ me with whatever you want, whenever you feel like it, without so much as a notification, without even warning me that you’ve made me a _rabbit in a cage_ , put there for your edification and amusement; _fuck_ you; you unbelievable _cunt_ ; you could have told me what you wanted; you could have _told_ me; ‘Nick, we’re planning to experimentally fuck with your alien genes; it might possibly drive you mad or cause you brain damage, so sorry about that;’ you could have _told me_ ; and now you want me to _cooperate?_ Go _fuck_ yourself!”

Unruffled, Telford stood, and bent, and picked the cigarette up. “What do you think the SGC was doing?” he asked mildly, raising an eyebrow. He offered the cigarette to Rush.

“I don’t know; I can’t wait to hear your extraordinarily selective and carefully-edited counter-narrative,” Rush said cuttingly. He snatched the cigarette from Telford’s hand. “Or will it be complete fiction, I wonder?”

“You know it’s not,” Telford said. He settled again, comfortably, on the bed: one leg crossed over the other. “Lam told me you found out that they sequenced your genes. Why do you think they were so interested? They didn’t recruit you to work on the cyphers. The plan was always to turn you into— whatever they need to access that weapon. They have a Goa’uld lab on another planet, ready and waiting. They’re already synthesizing the necessary chemicals. They’ve been talking about how to do it for months. They have a secret committee all set up. The project within the Icarus Project. I should know; I used to be the head of it. Now it’s Young, of course. It’s been Young for— oh, a month, I guess, since I got sidelined.”

Rush—

Telford was watching Rush’s expression. “I don’t know exactly how much he knew before that. I assume Jackson told him _something_ ; it was definitely Jackson’s idea to have him move in across from you.”

“I—“ Rush said.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He did not know where he was.

“You know, we could have a rational conversation,” Telford said, “but last time you were determined to rip the skin off your wrists. How about this time? Are you going to— oh, Jesus Christ, Nick.”

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He had wrapped his arms around his knees and buried his head there. He sat with his back to the wall and his bare feet on the floor.

At some point he had begun shivering, a strange nervous shiver that seemed to start at his backbone rather than his skin. But after an indeterminate length of time, this tapered and then stopped.

How interesting it was to be a person, an organic apparatus possessed of a nervous system, and thus subject to these chaotic responses.

He closed his eyes and used the stub of his cigarette to light another.

Something about the way the combustion transferred from one object to another reminded him of—

It was on the tip of his tongue.

 _Pyrolysis_ , he thought, and then did not know why he had thought it. Objects at extreme temperatures undergo a form of decomposition.

A chemical decomposition that is not reversible.

The possibility occurred to him that he was contemplating this because he did not wish to contemplate what Telford had revealed.

Of course he had known that the SGC had plans for him. He simply hadn’t known—

He was in quite a lot of _pain_ , was the thing. The current, important thing. He could not immediately identify the nature of the pain, which was a difficulty that he had suffered from since childhood. It had frustrated Gloria to no end, though perhaps also fascinated her in equal measure. It had seemed to her the most fundamental agency of the body, to locate its own suffering— and more than that, to give it a name. To name a thing was to control it, after all: to contain it, to rule that there were areas over which it had no power by delineating the areas over which it did. _What do you feel, then?_ she had asked him. _I mean— one doesn’t just say, ‘I have pain,’ and leave it at that, surely. Wittgenstein would call it ungrammatical._ Rush had considered how to respond. He’d said, _I suppose that principally I feel uncomfortable_. He had not wanted to discuss the issue with her. He had sensed that she lacked the experience to understand. Like a cuttlefish trying to understand what it felt like to be human, except that in this case she was the human and he was the cuttlefish. She could not enter into the darker waters. She was not designed for the abyssal atmospheres.

 _I feel thirsty,_ he’d said on another occasion. _All right? Not metaphorically thirsty. I have to consider whether I need a glass of water or I’m emotionally distressed. Or, I don’t know, out-of-breath, dizzy; choose your physical sensation. Does it matter? Is it really so important? You must understand that, from my perspective, people seem to spend an inordinate amount of time discussing their personal feelings. It simply doesn’t interest me._

Emotions did not interest him, in general. He was interested in action. At times his actions seemed eccentric to others: disconnected, strange. These others had no access to the world as experienced through his particular limbic system, or perhaps they would have found themselves able to comprehend. An action was not a _response_ ; it was not the effect that followed some cause; it was epistemological, it was ontological, it was entangled with the emotion, the emotion-that-was-not-an-emotion. How else was he to _feel anything,_ if not through action; how else was he to communicate that he _felt something_ ; how else was he to know what it was that he _felt?_

He missed Gloria suddenly. Perhaps that was an emotion, but he felt it in his whole body like a fever-ache. Like something you could die from. Presumably there were fevers that set in like that, suddenly, all at once, and you scarcely knew you were ill before it took you, as people used to say. Or malaria: sudden but recurring. Yes. His feelings about Gloria were malarial in nature. Why was she not here; why was she not _here_ , physically manifest in this moment, a warm solid arm draped around his shoulders and a curtain of thick wheat-coloured hair falling forwards as she bent her head to whisper something to him? She would have reasoned-out a solution to the problem. She alone, out of all the persons on Earth or elsewhere, had been able to read the cryptic language of his self-expression and communicate meaningfully back to him. Or perhaps they had stumbled into a pidgin, both of them, combining their forms of communication and creating something separate and emergent. It had taken on a life of its own, evolving grammar and syntax and complicated wordplay. It had no native speakers. He would never speak it again. And now that Gloria was gone—

“Why aren’t you here?” he whispered. “Why did you go away?”

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

His face was pressed to the door. His palms were flat against it.His throat ached. “You bastard,” he said again.

“Yes. I think we’re clear on where we both stand now,” Telford said. “Me, the bastard. You, the pathetic victim. You had a chance to not be that, but you trashed it. I’m sorry you did that, Nick.” He had crossed the room as he was speaking. He put a hand on Rush’s shoulder.

Rush flinched violently away from him. “Don’t touch me!”

“I offended you, huh? I didn’t mean to. Don’t worry; I’m sure you give great head. And if you were willing to work with me, well— who knows?” Telford gave Rush a lopsided smile. “We could’ve been kings. But that’s not going to happen, is it? Unfortunately, that means you’re going to have to go back to sleep now.”

“No.” Rush backed away from him, feeling sick. “No. Don’t. I’ll— I won’t set anything on fire. I won’t _do_ anything. Or I will. If you like. Whatever you like. This isn’t necessary.”

“Yeah, I kind of don’t believe that.” Telford had reached into his pocket and pulled out a capped syringe. “It’s a compliment, really. You are _incredibly_ good at causing trouble.”

Rush had run up against the far wall. “Don’t do this,” he said. “David. You’re— we’re friends. You don’t have to keep doing this.”

Telford took the cap off the syringe. “The thing is, I don’t think you can help yourself. You know, the Air Force did a lot of research on you. I read all of it. The first time you got what somebody might call a record, you were six years old. Do you even remember this? It was when they put you in foster care for the first time. Your parents had fucked off for three weeks and left you alone; a neighbour called it in. You know what you did then? You tried to set the foster home on fire. It’s actually kind of cute— you just don’t change much. I do get it.” He was facing Rush, who had backed himself into a corner. “There are things about ourselves we can’t fix. Broken things. I want to believe you. But I just don’t think you make very good choices. So this is one choice I’m going to have to make on your behalf.”

Rush was conscious of his heart clenching like a fist in his chest. What a strange way of thinking about the heart, he thought to himself, because he could also feel it knocking against his ribs, as though he was driving the fist of it into his own body from the inside. He wished that it would burst through him. He wished for the ability to set Telford on fire. He pictured his heart coming out of his chest, burning. “You think I’m the only broken one in this room?” he said in a low voice seething with tension.

Telford leaned in close to him, so close that their cheeks brushed. “Think of it as a gift I’m giving you,” he said, “that I can’t give myself. You’ve got nothing, Nick. Your wife’s dead. Your boyfriend was planning to restart your brain. You don’t have any friends. And when your parents weren’t smacking you around— well, you know what they told the police that time? They straight-up forgot about you.”

Rush made a low inadvertent sound and tried to jerk away. “Fuck you.”

“I’m not saying this to hurt you.”

“You’re not hurting me,” Rush said. It was another stupid, obvious sentence. But the intent this time felt quite different.

“I know what it’s like,” Telford said.“To come from nothing. To be nobody. But I’m going to make you into somebody incredible.”

 _I don’t want that_ , Rush wanted to say, but he did not know if he wanted that or not or what it meant, and mostly he wanted to be no one, and perhaps that was what Telford was offering him, really; the chance for there not to be a him who had to choose, a chance for there to be no him whose fault it was, and that was good, but he wanted for there to be no him it happened to; can you do that? he wanted to ask Telford. Can you remake me so completely, a ship of Theseus venturing into the labyrinth instead of the hero himself? But the labyrinth was the country of half-men half-animals and it was the country of half-men half-monsters and he did not know what would happen to him there. Perhaps he could be not a ship but only a ball of thread unspooling, losing coherence as it was used up until there was no ball of thread. Yes. That was what he wanted, and if he was a ball of thread then he would not be a person, and he would never have been a man who laid his head in another man’s lap; he would never have been a man who loved the curtain of a woman’s hair falling like ripe grain around him; he would never have been a man who lay facedown in the dirt with a boot upon him; he would have no history, or only the history of a ball of thread, and like that, he thought, like that he could enter the labyrinth and he liked the idea. Unspool me, was what he wanted to say. Go ahead.

But, before he could even consent, Telford had slipped the needle into him.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He was lying on the floor, and he was alone.

His shaky breath had fogged the black stone and turned it warm.

After a moment, absently, he drew a fingertip through the condensation. He sketched the outline of a house, a buffalo, a sofa.

He felt tired.

He did not want to be here any longer.

He wiped the pictures away with a slow hand.

He could see the reflection of his hand in the floor’s glossy surface: the place where the two hands touched each other. His hand and the ghostly hand. Or were they both his hands? He spread his fingers like a starfish and watched as the ghostly hand spread its fingers, too. One was realer than the other, he assumed, but he found that he could not immediately say which one. No obvious means of testing presented itself.

 _For then we saw through a glass darkly,_ he thought. _But now: face to face. Then I knew in part, but now I know even as also I am known._

Was that right?

He wasn’t sure that was right.

He thought that if he pushed just a little against the glass, his fingertips would sink into it, and he would be able to grab hold of the things that lay beneath.

What sorts of things?

He didn’t know.

Better things than here.

He did not want to be here any longer. He did not like the things of this world.

So he exerted the smallest amount of pressure, and watched as his hand began to slip through the solid stone floor.

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

Telford was waiting for an answer.

It took Rush some time to recall what the question had been.

But then, finally, he remembered.

“I was just wondering whether you ever thought about pyrolysis,” he said.


	37. Fugue, Pt. 1: B

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please heed the last chapter's content warning, which particularly applies here.

The first thing that they do is cut her hair.

Ginn does not know why, out of the variegated possibilities of violence, this is what they should choose first— after they have shot the men who were attempting to teach her the subtle situational differences that attend the quality of parmesan cheese; after they have shot her as well, but only once she has seen their faces, and known them, and so has had the opportunity to be scared. After she has awakened and known herself in space, and then on a planet whose designation is not familiar to her, and so has had the time to once again be frightened. After all of this. Why her hair? She considers the strategic value of such an act numbly while great fistfuls of her hair are hacked off with leathering shears, and then when the knife comes out and she is held like a _kivs_ that kicks against the foal-season’s shearing while the blade scrapes brusquely and carelessly over the topography of her head.

It cuts. She bleeds.

She fixes her gaze upon the agglomerated hair that dirties the stone floor of the gate room in heaps. It was once a part of her body, a thesis that she finds astounding. The blood that runs down her face in very thin and very narrow sluicing currents was once a part of her body, too. Now it leaks from her as though the water-lock of her body is broken, and Simeon shoves her face down in it with a hand on her neck.

“Tau’ri whore,” he says.

The blood and hair get in her mouth. She does not like the texture. She gags without intention and tries to spit. She should not have betrayed the bodily confidence of this disgust, however, for Simeon laughs and constrains her there, grinding her mouth into these dead parts of her, these parts of her that smell and taste and have a touch of the dead.

A sleek boot. A dark shadow, elegant above her. “Put her on her knees,” Kiva says.

Simeon and Koz force her into the requisite position.

Ginn’s view of the world is vertiginous. She postulates that the blood has rushed from her head. Her digits are numb, her toes and fingers. However this is best explained by the restraints that hold her fast.

She attempts to hold herself upright, for this reason: the gate room is multitudinous with people. Many whom she knows are present: Zaffa and Loren and Yar and Shad. If she does not hold herself upright she will be shamed. That is the effect that Kiva desires, she theorizes. That is the strategic value of this act. She knows with the sore and burdensome weight of a large stone in her belly that Kiva will achieve her objective. Ginn will be shamed. But she will not shame herself.

“Brothers and sisters of Sixth House,” Kiva says. She is outfitted splendidly in seamless leather; her hair is raked back and her eyes are onyxed with outlines of kohl. She prowls the terrain before the gate. “Once, you had a sister called Ginn of the Bengedi. The Lucian Alliance embraced her. We clothed her. We fed her. We raised her. We taught her to fight, so that she might never be ground under the heel of those to whom she will not swear allegiance, as so many of our forebears were ground under the System Lords’ heels. We were her family. We were her _House_. And just as a family and a House give everything for their children, we were prepared to give everything for her.”

She pauses and looks at Ginn for the first time. Her eyes are as fierce and hard as vitreous rock. Ginn is brought in mind of the dinosaurs that Rush and Colonel Samantha Carter and Dr. Jackson insist are not real. The dinosaurs are dead and only their bones remain, buried in rock. They have been dead for an amount of time that Ginn cannot enter to a fathom. The images of them in Tau’ri films are only special affectations. And yet Kiva has such eyes that it is as though she had climbed out of the rock after ten thousands of years, still possessed of the animal, ancient, hunting instinct— indefinably unhuman— that Ginn knows the dinosaurs had.

“Yet Ginn betrayed us,” Kiva says. “Ginn sold her loyalty as you or I might sell a cut of meat at market. She killed the man Varro, who had been set to protect her—“

“That’s not true,” Ginn says loudly. “It’s not true!”

Simeon slams her head against the stone floor.

Her vision fills with electric follicules.

Her ears ring.

She wonders with inanity for a moment if this is what the music that Rush hears sounds like. She has never asked him what it sounds like, the music that he hears. This seems an unaccountable oversight. She wishes now that she knew. She would have liked to hear it. She would have liked to be able to tell him that she too had heard it. It would have resolved none of her current difficulties. But still, she would have liked to tell him that she too had heard.

“—these things,” Kiva says, “I render the following judgment.”

Ginn has missed part of Kiva’s speech. Kiva will not be pleased, she thinks, and then registers that there are flaws in her thinking. There is a word that Rush uses, _hysterical_. She is hysterical, she thinks.

“To the girl Ginn of the Bengedi, we extended a life on credit, with the understanding that it was to be repaid. Since she has shown herself unwilling to make good on the debt, we must claim by force all those things that she owes: her skills, her labor, her body. Ginn of the Bengedi no longer exists. She is no longer a person. She no longer has a life. In her place is a piece of property that belongs to Sixth House.”

Kiva points to Ginn. “We have cut her hair so that when you see her, you will remember that she is not a person. You will not speak to her. You will not acknowledge her. Why would you need to acknowledge a person who does not exist? And now—“ She abruptly arcs her arm to the left and engages in a short, sharp, queenly gesture of impatience. Radi hurries to place a weapon in it.

“Now,” Kiva says, her eyes settling upon Ginn, “we mark her so that you will remember what she is. We mark her not with the knife of the traitor, but with the brand of the animal. She is lower than an animal. An animal has life, but she is no-life. Koz— Simeon—“

Simeon grips Ginn’s shoulders. His hands are as hard as docking clamps. Koz produces his knife and uses it to rend the t-shaped shirt Ginn is wearing. It is the shirt with the buffalo on it. He takes hold of the two halves thus created and pulls them one from another, exposing Ginn’s white unsunned skin and her small breasts.

Her face goes hot. Perhaps she feels shame. Perhaps she is grieving the buffalo in the snow. There are not many of its kind left. It was only a fictional representation. But her people believed in a kind of magic that meant those things that carry a resemblance to one another are tied to each other with invisible threads. A man’s hair or his shirt or a clay figure in his likeness could be used to do harm to him. To heal a man, you wrote the name of God on a very small piece of precious parchment paper and boiled it up into a drink. Then God was in you through the water. And the buffalo is in the shirt. The cosmos is crowded, occluded even, with these little cords tying things together. At least, that is what her people believed.

She considers about her homeworld as Kiva advances towards her, elegant upon the spines of polished boots. As she makes sense of what Kiva holds in her hand.

Her homeworld had sun and trees and water. She had lived in a house by the river. She had possessed parents: a mother and a father. Brothers. Perhaps two brothers. Had they not wanted her, this family? Had they not desired a daughter, who would, when she came to be married, levy such an elevated price? _Why didn’t you want me?_ she thinks, though perhaps they had wanted her. Perhaps they had wanted only the best. She will never now know. She can choose only to love or not love them, an evaluation made with imperfect data, utilizing the faulty apparatus that is herself. And in this instant she feels such a surfeit of love. She does not know where it comes from. It wells up out of the cracks in her body like the blood that streaks her face like teardrops. She can feel the wire-thin cord that connects her to her parents, as she feels that one that connects her to Varro, and to Rush; all these knots that there is no untying, not even in death. Not even in death, or worse.

She closes her eyes for a moment, to make herself steady.

“I believe,” Kiva says, flicking a glance at Simeon and Koz, “that both of you will be required to hold her.”

She raises the hot radiant line of the hooked iron bar she is holding, and presses it very precisely between Ginn’s breasts, forming the first stroke of the Sixth House insignia.

Ginn screams.

She screams again as the bar marks the second stroke.

She goes on screaming for a long time after that.

* * *

She wakes in a bedroom from which the furniture has been removed. She ascertains that it is a bedroom because the walls— she sees in the dim light— are plated with bronze, in the style of the System Lords, whom the Alliance has never enabled itself not to imitate. The bronze is not bright, but polished enough to offer a variety of reflection, so that Ginn can see a blurry ghost of her face when she turns her head to the side.

She is lying on the sharpglass floor. Someone has wrapped her chest in surgical cloth. So large is the area encompassed by the burns inflicted by Kiva that the surgical cloth forms a kind of shirt. There had been seventeen strokes in all. She remembers only nine of them. She had lost her consciousness after the sixth, but Koz had slapped her awake. She supposes that Kiva was bored by the ninth stroke, weary of the grating sound of Ginn’s screams. Nevertheless all seventeen are present. Ginn can feel them.

She does not think she can move her arms.

She can move her hands. She rotates her wrist to lift one, and watches the pale shape in the bronze reflection. She waves at herself.

“Hello,” she whispers.

She smiles without advertence because the act is so absurd. Or because she looks so strange. Ghost-Ginn without her red hair. She is not a girl any longer. She does not look like a girl. She does not look like anything.

“You are a not a person,” she says to herself.

Her reflection listens, but it does not say anything.

Ginn turns away from it and stares at the ornamented ceiling. Its bronze is punched with constellations. She fabricates that they are stars and that there is no ceiling to the room. Only an infinitely traversable void in which she floats as though she is truly not a person, devoid of body and of anything.

It comforts her. And after a while she goes to sleep, although the pain is very bad.

* * *

She wakes again when a casualty officer comes to change her surgical cloth. The officer is a woman whom Ginn does not know, with fair hair in a long braid.

“Thank you,” Ginn says when the woman kneels beside her.

The woman does not respond. She does not look at Ginn’s face.

“—I’m not a person,” Ginn realizes. “You’re not allowed to speak to me.”

The woman, again, does not say anything. She cuts the cloth on either side of Ginn’s chest and carefully peels it back from the burns.

The pain as she does so is—

Ginn loses her consciousness before she has time to scream.

* * *

She wakes alone.

She stares at the ceiling.

She had not thought that a body could hurt so much.

She moves her wrists. She lifts her arms an inch or so off the ground and cannot go further.

She wonders how long it has been.

After a time has passed, she cannot tolerate the silence.

Turning to her ghost-reflection, she says, “The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the straits. On the French coast the light gleams and is one. The cliffs of England stand glimmering and vast out in the tranquil bay. French signifies an item whose origin is in the France nation. England is a part-nation. It is adjacent to the part-nation that Rush comes from. It is on the other side of an ocean. Or—“ She falters. “I suppose that now it is very much farther away.”

She must then turn away from her reflection, because this sentence has caused her eyes to water.

Rush had said that England was very green, but that Scotland was gray. Scotland was his part-nation. He had showed her a photograph on his telephone. Inside the photograph was a gray sky and an iron post with a light-box on it. The post was ornamented with a fanciful picture in metals. Rush had explained to her what it meant: Scottishans believed that a long time ago there had been people called _saints_ with special powers that they said came from gods, but probably these people weren’t System Lords, and one of them was called Mungo, and he did magical things like bring a bird back to life, and start a fire from nothing, and found a ring inside a fish that he pulled from a river. The miracles did not seem very miraculous to Ginn, but she liked the poem that relates them.

“Here is the bird that never flew,” she whispers. “Here is the tree that never grew. Here is the bell that never rang. Here is the fish that never swam.”

She doesn’t know what it means. But it makes her feel better.

Perhaps it only means that things once thought fruitless in the form to which they were given lie in waiting to bear another fruit. Like the new dinosaurs in _Jurassic Park_. Everyone thought they were sterile. But they changed their genders to procreate. Another sort of miracle.

“Life finds a way,” she says under her breath.

And then she takes a deep breath and closes her eyes.

“Prologue,” she says. “The Bite of the Raptor. The tropical rain fell in drenching sheets, hammering the corrugated roof of the clinic building, roaring down the metal gutters, splashing on the ground in a torrent. Roberta Carter sighed, and stared out the window. From the clinic, she could hardly see the beach or the ocean beyond, cloaked in low fog. This wasn’t what she had expected when she had come to the fishing village of— when she had come to a fishing village in a country I don’t know the name of, to spend two months as a visiting physician. She had been in the village for three weeks now, and it had rained every day…”

* * *

One day, she finds she can sit.

Although it could be night, she supposes.

* * *

She talks to herself a lot of the time. Or to her reflection, the Ginn in the walls and floor.

She thinks she can see the cord that ties them together. It is transparent and comes out of her heart. It carries her when her body is a limp mass that she wishes to be rid of. She pictures that: the other Ginn hauling her around with forced briskness, as one would haul a particularly stubborn pet  _klev_ or an FTL drive component. She even locates it within herself to laugh.

“Why are you doing this?” she whispers, running a hand over the soft uneven hair that has started to germinate on her head.

No response forthcomes from her ghostly other self, caught in the midst of the same motion.

* * *

Simeon comes with a knife and cuts her hair again.

Because he is not permitted to treat her as a person, he does not eye her sexually, as he used to. Instead he places his gaze on the bronze wall, and jerks her head up so that he ensures that she sees this. One hand drops low and performs a thorough survey of her exposed breasts.

“Don’t,” Ginn says.

He pinches her nipple. “Animals don’t speak,” he says.

“I’ll tell Kiva that you wish to do me the honor of trying to give me a child."

He sighs: a sound of boredom. His hand gentles: his fingertips stroke the same nipple until it grows to a peak, and then withdraw. “You’re mistaken,” he said. “You delude yourself. As though any man would.”

Ginn stares at her reflection as he returns to scraping her hair off. She watches as he cradles her face in one hand. Two fingers push against her lips and finally part them. She keeps her eyes on her own eyes. Why does the other Ginn not kill him? It is obvious to Ginn that she could, so she must possess her reasons. And, in fact, the other Ginn regards her knowingly, as though they share some secret between them. It is an amusing secret, how easily Simeon could die. The other Ginn might as well touch her finger to her lips and say, _Shh._

Simeon sheathes his knife and makes a show of trailing his palm over Ginn’s scalp. He laughs when she shivers.

“I’ll look forward to seeing you again, little animal,” he says.

* * *

After an indeterminate amount of time has passed— the casualty woman coming and going in silence, bringing new white cloth to tie around Ginn’s chest— the door opens to admit not the casualty woman but Kiva: carrying an armor bag, and clad in her usual precision of leathers, all blunt matte planes and spiny angled ends.

Ginn cannot manufacture enough of any emotion to be as frightened as she should be. With her back braced against the bronze wall she looks at Kiva tiredly. “Are _you_ allowed to speak to me?” she asks. “Or must you pretend I’m a rock, like the others? I can’t see how I’m going to be much use to you if you must.”

Without altering her expression, Kiva drives the sharp toe of a boot into Ginn’s ribs.

Ginn doubles over in agony, speechless and breathless and curled into herself on the floor.

“If you feel that there is nothing I am capable of doing to worsen your situation,” Kiva says, composed, “allow me to disabuse you of that notion. There is always something worse. I will have your wounds opened and packed with salt. I will have your feet removed. You don’t require your feet to program computers.”

Ginn presses her lips together. She looks away.

“Excellent,” Kiva says. “I see we understand one another.” She tosses the bag at Ginn’s feet. “You have had quite enough time to feel sorry for yourself. It is time for you to begin fulfilling your debt to me. Your clothing is in that bag. Tau’ri clothes for a Tau’ri whore. You will wear them until they fall off your body; I have no obligation to provision you any longer.”

Ginn slowly lifts herself upright and takes the bag in both hands. When she opens it, she finds her socks and sneakers, her black military jacket and the rags of her buffalo shirt. She spreads her hands across the shirt’s strangely-textured, split-in-half picture. She had not thought that she would see it again.

“It hasn’t got any fastenings,” she says in a low voice. “—The shirt. It won’t stay together.”

Kiva gives her a bored look. “Is this my concern? If there is a citizen of Sixth House who likes to fuck rocks, they can enjoy the sight of your tits if they want to.”

Ginn thinks she will save that one to repeat to Simeon. A citizen who likes to fuck rocks.

Kiva says, “Put the clothes on.”

“Now?” Ginn asks.

“Don’t play the idiot.”

So Ginn toes her way into her socks and sneakers, though she cannot reach forward far enough to tie the laces. She struggles to a feeted position and puts her shirt on one-handed, leaning against the wall with the other hand. Then the same with the jacket.

She feels more human with her clothes on. Less of a worm-like creature squirming in the darkness. Less of a rock. She thinks that this is not what Kiva intended.

Whoever had gone through the pockets of her jacket had taken the pens with metal points— the good gel-point pen that Samantha Carter had given her for easy writing, and the so-called “fountain” pen that Daniel Jackson showed her how to dip in ink— but they had left her the ones with blunt felt or plastic ends. She slips her hand into her pocket and closes it around a ball-pointed pen for comfort. It is of a taxonomy that comes with a cap, which she likes greatly.

“I’m— I’m dressed,” she ventures, when she sees that Kiva is waiting.

“Good,” Kiva says, turning on her heel towards the door. “Now you will accompany me to the laboratory where we are holding your friend, the Tau’ri man with the Ancient genome.”

Ginn, who had been preparing to follow her, stops. “Rush?” she says in a voice that she does not recognize as her own. “Rush is here?”

Kiva appears impatient. “Of course ‘Rush’ is here. Do you think you’re so important that we’d organize an Earth-based mission to retrieve you, after the damage had already been done? You’re a nothing. An insect. The whole point of taking _you_ was to draw _him_ out of hiding while his little garrison was occupied. David says there’s a computer term for this; you ought to know it.”

“David,” Ginn whispers, the cumulative horror turning her fingers cold.

“Social engineering,” Kiva says. She opens the door. “That’s the term. Are you coming or aren’t you? That was a joke, by the way; you’re coming. But it will be so much more unpleasant for both of us if I have to drag you by a leash.”

And so Ginn pads numbly out of the room after her, trying not to trip-wire her sneaker laces as she balances on feet that have forgotten how to work.

* * *

Rush is—

“You will not speak to him,” Kiva had said, as she paced sharp-heeled through the halls of the base. “You will not look at him. _He_ will not look at or speak to _you_. Is this understood?”

“Yes,” Ginn had said.

But she had not correctly calculated how difficult it would be to stand and—

Rush is lying upon an ordinary gurney, very like a gurney from the Stargate Mountain casualty center. He is wearing his ordinary clothing: his crooked glasses and his blue jeans and his many-fastened shirt. His jacket rests folded upon a chair in which David Telford is not sitting. David Telford is not sitting in the chair because he is leaning restlessly against the wall with his arms crossed across his chest. He is wearing his black Stargate suit. The scene is uncomfortably familiar. It might almost be an ordinary day at the Stargate Mountain casualty center, if Rush’s wrists were not restrained to the bed.

Rush blinks at her, sleepy-eyed and confused. “Ginn? Have you broken another television? Is that why they let you in here? What's happened to your hair?"

“ _Don’t_ speak to him,” Kiva says harshly. “Don’t look at him.”

Ginn lowers her eyes to the floor. Her hands are shaking. But they are in her pockets, and so Kiva cannot see that they are shaking.

She breathes in and out. She curls her right hand around the plastic barrel of a pen. One of the good kind, with little caps. She had asked Daniel Jackson why they came with caps, when no one ever seemed to cap them. He had made a face that indicated he was about to say something ironical. He'd said, _An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age._ Ginn presumed that there had in fact been such an age, an age when everyone utilized their pen caps. She was disappointed to have missed it. She felt that she was always missing things.

She has missed the opportunity to speak with Rush. To know him. She did not use their time wisely. She did not know it would be over so quickly.

She wishes that she could see his face. She wouldn’t have to speak to him. She wouldn’t communicate via her eyes, even if she had the secret of such a subtle language. She only wishes to _see_ him, although she is certain that he is disgusted by her: in her ripped-open shirt, with only a stubble for hair, and with who-knows-what scars interrupting the stubble. The person who caused him to be encaptured: this wretched, worm-like her. Still. Still, she wishes to see his face, the face of someone to whom she is not an insect, a nothing.

But she does not look up.

“He’s a little confused right now,” Telford says.

“As usual,” Kiva says, sounding irritated. “You had better hope that the girl is capable of solving the last cipher, after all this.”

“Me?” Ginn asks in surprise, spiting her superior judgment. “ _I_ can’t solve the cipher.”

Then her head is full of bells, because Kiva has hit her. The Tau’ri call this tintinnabulation. Ginn likes that they have a word for it. She listens to the tintinnabulation. Her eyes water copiously.

“You’ll give her a concussion,” Telford says. “Then she definitely won’t be able to solve the cipher.”

“I’ll discipline my own people, thank you,” Kiva says.

“Don’t touch her!” Rush says, sounding agitated. There is a clang of magnetic restraints locking fast against the bed railings. “Don’t you dare touch her! I want to speak with her!”

“If you speak to her, she will be punished,” Kiva says coldly.

“Nick,” Telford says. “We talked about this. Remember?”

“No,” Rush says. "No." He looks frightened. "You're lying. You drugged me."

"I didn't drug you this time."

"You stole my memories. You stood on my back."

"That was a week and a half ago," Telford says.

"No," Rush says again. He shakes his head, restless. "David— you have to help me. I think— I think someone stole my memories. Don't leave me here."

“What have you _done_ to him?” Ginn whispers, agonized. In her pocket, she is cutting into her palm with the cap of her pen.

Kiva says indifferently, “You can hardly expect that an Ancient would think in the same way as a human. And we are turning him into an Ancient, of sorts. It is not your concern. Sit at the computer, please.”

She indicates a flat Lucian computer interface table upon which a Tau’ri laptop has been placed. The bleak metal chair at the table also has a look of the Tau’ri about it. Ginn ponders David Telford secreting a chair into an interstellar Lucian base. How, practically, would such an objective be achieved? Did he possess his own tel’tak? Perhaps an al’kesh? Did he simply purchase furniture from a Tau’ri store and have it delivered to the ship’s cloaked location? Was he readying himself all a long time for the instant when he would have to defect?

She wonders if Telford is really prepared for life as a permanent member of the Lucian Alliance. She wonders if anyone has told him what that life entails. She wonders if he knows what Goa’uld cuisine is like, or that there are no movies.

She is thinking these thoughts to distract herself as she sits and stares at the computer, because the computer is running a program she recognizes, and it is the program designed to modify the output of Rush’s interference transmitters.

“Modifying the output of the transmitters, for whatever reason,” she says haltingly, “would almost certainly have a detrimental effect.”

“We’ve reached a plateau,” Kiva says. “The protocol we’ve been using to induce electrophysiological changes is no longer functioning normally. We must consider the possibility that the transmitters are inhibiting further changes. I would like you to please demonstrate the effect of two programming alterations: first taking the output of the implants down to zero, and then using them to mimic the abnormal brainwaves he was experiencing, rather than suppress them.”

Ginn sits with her hands in her lap. “He has seizures,” she says. “He could die.”

“We’ve brought him out of plenty of seizures already.”

Ginn closes her eyes.

The room is cold, she registers. She had not noticed. She wonders what sort of climate is native to the planet that they currently inhabit.

Telford is talking in a quiet voice to Rush. He reaches out and moves a line of hair back from Rush’s forehead, placing it behind Rush’s ear. Ginn imagines herself as Kiva. _Don’t speak to him!_ she shouts. _Don’t look at him!_ She wears sleek black leather, in this imagining. Her boots are as sharp as daggers. Her long hair is pulled back from her face. She carries an iron brand.

But she has no long hair, and she has no boots or weapons. So she cannot be Kiva. She can only be Ginn.

“I won’t do it,” she whispers.

Kiva fixes her with an incredulous look. “What?”

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they _should_ ,” Ginn says.

This time it is Telford who fixes her with an incredulous look. It is a complicated look. Ginn thinks he wants to laugh, a little, but a greater proportion of the look is sad. “That’s a line from _Jurassic Park_ ,” he says. “Really? That’s your counter-argument? A quote from a movie?”

“I won't do this,” Ginn says. "It's wrong." She speaks to him, because she knows that Kiva is beyond hearing. It was Kiva who ordered her woken when the pain had passed her out. But Telford has seen _Jurassic Park._ He has read Shakespeare and Eliot and Aldous Huxley, and Victor Hugo, whom Ginn did not understand. He has read Milton, whom Ginn gave up on. He knows about Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, the first of whom died because he would not eat, and the second of whom died because he did. Telford knows all the books that Rush told her she was required to know to be a person. And so presumably there is still in him something that can listen.

He looks away from her.

“I won't,” Ginn says.

But it is Kiva who answers her. “If the thought of your own punishment is not sufficient to move you to action,” Kiva says, “then perhaps I ought to remind you that I am also capable of hurting _him.”_ She motions her head at Rush. “Shall I do to him what I did to you? He is, after all, my property. Perhaps he should show it.”

“No!” Ginn says. Her eyes are watering copiously, as they had done when Kiva hit her, and she doesn’t know why. It isn’t crying. She doesn’t know how to cry. But even she will produce tears as a physiological reflex. So perhaps this reflex is the cause. “No, please. You can’t do that.” She drags her jacket sleeve over her face. “You can’t do that to him. Please. You’re hurting him already.”

“If you don’t wish to see him punished,” Kiva says, “and I assure you that you _would_ see it; you would have the position of honor, right by my side, as his flesh cooked under the iron—“

Ginn chokes on the flood of her own tears-that-are-not-tears. “If I show you— if I show you that it hurts him— will you let me stop?”

“—then I suggest you do as you are told.”

“I will,” Ginn says wretchedly. “I will. Please don’t hurt him. But if I show you, will you let me stop?”

Kiva turns a remote gaze upon her. “That decision will be based on other factors. What I require to know right now is that you will obey my commands as I give them to you.”

“I will.” Ginn fumbles her hands onto the laptop keyboard. They are clumsy with trembling. “I will. See, I am.”

“Perhaps I should have him branded anyway. As a lesson.”

“Please. Please, tell me what I have to do.”

“I expect you to obey me because obeying is all that stands between you and pain,” Kiva says. “Between _him_ and pain. Between you and death.”

Ginn makes a low moaning sound. It is an animal sound. The soft animals that succeeded the dinosaurs, because they could only thrive when the last of the dinosaurs was dead. Before then, they knew only survival. They had no other thought in their soft, silly, easily-torn-open, warm-blooded little animal heads. “Please,” she says again, her voice thick with tears. “Please tell me what to do.”

“Kneel,” Kiva says.

Ginn falls out of the metal chair in her haste to reach the floor.

“Your containment room,” Kiva says, “is extraordinarily dirty, no doubt because you lie there stewing in your own self-pity, weeping like a child all day. My boots are stained from having to enter it. You will oblige me by cleaning them.”

Ginn looks at Kiva’s boots. They are, as ever, immaculate: the black leather oiled and flawless. She reaches out and touches the leather hesitantly. “I don’t understand,” she says. She locates a speck of dust and brushes it away, then rubs the spot that it had clung to.

“No,” Kiva says.

And then Ginn understands.

She stares at her own reflection in the floor’s polished sharpglass. The ghostly Ginn who lives under there. That girl has nothing in her eyes.

She wonders if Rush can see her. If Rush is capable of comprehension.

She considers what Dr. Ian Malcolm would do. What would Dr. Ian Malcolm do, if faced with a comparable situation?

She cannot imagine a comparable situation.

She bends over, bracing herself against the floor with her hands. The position is extremely painful. She thinks of her ghost-self on the other side of the floor, pushing back against her, holding her up as though they form a complicated balancing act. It is a good thought. She hopes that the other Ginn agrees with her. She wills a current of strength through their connection as she lowers her head.

“There’s a good girl,” Kiva says.

The boot-leather tastes, under Ginn’s tongue, like the dead animal whose stiff, tough hide it is.

She hears Telford make an abrupt, discontinued sound when he sees the act that she is performing. “Is this really necessary?” he asks, a moment later.

“Don’t test my patience,” Kiva says.

“Or you’ll do what?”

 _Don’t_ , Ginn thinks. _Don’t try to find out._

Kiva says, “You’ve lost your position on Earth. That significantly diminishes your value as an asset.”

Telford says, “I’m the only reason you have Rush. And you’d better believe that if I go, he goes.”

“That is the impasse at which we find ourselves,” Kiva agrees. “For the moment.”

Ginn applies her tongue to the other boot. Her eyes have stopped watering, she notes with a mechanical kind of surprise. So presumably the pain has passed.

Perhaps Kiva is right, and she has been stewing in self-pity.

She pictures herself as an overcooked cut of meat. The inside, she supposes, of the animal whose skin she is now licking.

She must become an animal with skin. She must become the skin of an animal.

That is what warriors wear into battle. There is a story that her people have in common with Earth, of a warrior who wears the skin of an animal that cannot be pierced by any weapon. Only this great warrior could devise a way to slay the animal, so that he could skin it and eat of the honey that insects formulated in its head. Ginn is not a great warrior, and she does not think she can be. But she can be as impervious as animal-skin.

She feels light and hollow, imagining it.

It is easier, after that, to rise and resume her station. And if later— after she has listened to Rush shiver and jerk and scream through her ministrations, keeping her gaze fixed upon her keyboard all the while; after Telford has said sharply, “This isn’t helping,” and then, “Just have the girl sit in on the sessions; that way we can fine-tune the levels,” and acquired Kiva’s grudging assent; after she has returned to her containment room, lightheaded and shaking with nausea— she screams until her throat rejects the further impulsion to issue forth a human or inhuman noise, then this is pardonable, particularly given that the screaming is accompanied by the beating of her fists against the walls, and surely such an action is very suitable for the skin of an animal. It is, after all, one way for skin to get tough.

She huddles against the floor at last, exhausted, and watches the bruises form on her hands. She thinks about the ghost who is sleeping underneath her, on the other side of the sharpglass. “Sweet dreams,” she whispers. “Other-Ginn.”

That is what people on Earth say. _Sweet dreams._ She is not on Earth any longer. It is likely that she will not be on Earth again. But Kiva would not like her to say it; she would see it as Tau’ri weakness. And to refuse to cease the acts that Kiva does not like is to deny her weapons their killing edge. If Ginn cannot go so far as to manufacture weapons of her own, then at least she can do this.

And she can do this: she can dream, in a state of half-awakeness, that she sees through the glass to where the other Ginn sits— not asleep at all, but crouched beside a skeleton that is much too large and much too vertebral to be one of the _gad-larot_ who stalked the mountains of her youth. As Ginn watches, the other Ginn reaches her hand through the empty eye of the skull, and pulls it out dripping with honey.

 _Eat_ , the other Ginn says.

“I don’t understand,” Ginn says.

The other Ginn says, _It’s a riddle._

When Ginn has eaten the honey that spills through her ghostly fingers, the other Ginn says, _Now your dreams will be sweet._

Ginn whispers, “I don’t think they will.”

 _They already are,_ the other Ginn says. _That’s the riddle._

* * *

In the morning, when she wakes, she can still taste the honey. She is dry-eyed, aching, light and hollow.

She presses the flats of her palms against the sharpglass and feels the answering touch, the tensile strength of the cord between them as it pulls tight.


	38. Fugue, Pt. 1: C

“Oh, fuck off,” Rush says in disgust, the first time. His teeth are still chattering from the electricity, an hour after they finished the initial stage of the protocol, so really it takes an impressive amount of work.

Telford doesn’t fuck off, though. “I brought you some water,” he says, from where he’s standing just inside the doorway. “And a blanket. That’s all.”

“I don’t want to touch anything you’ve touched. Get the fuck out.”

Telford puts the glass of water on the floor. He folds the blanket over one of the divans. He goes.

* * *

He’d tried to get off after leaving Rush’s room the previous day, when he could still taste Rush on him; he’d felt tense, dirty, impotent with disappointment. He’d thought about Rush squirming under him, Rush’s fingers tensing on his ribcage; imagined Rush doing what he’d promised: getting down on his knees and sliding his tongue up Telford’s cock. It’d be good; he’d have that smirk, that I-dare-you-to-dare-me expression, and Telford would wind fistfuls of his lank, chert-colored hair up, too tightly to be comfortable, because he’d never been one to turn down a dare. Rush got off on being pushed, was the thing, so you had to push him. Or pull him, in this particular example, till he gagged, and then he’d look up at Telford, breathless and dark eyes glaring with pleasure, and—

But the fantasy turned into Young in the end, breathing wetly against Telford’s collarbone. “Oh, fuck,” Young whispered. “That feels really good.”

“Yeah?” Telford asked him, hand moving slowly on him. “You like that?”

“Yeah.” Young gasped and shoved his face against Telford’s shoulder, fumbling an unthinking hand up to stroke the hair at the base of Telford’s neck. “Oh, my God. Oh, fuck.” His other hand was sweaty and flat against Telford’s pectorals. “Oh, my God. I’m gonna—“

“Not yet,” Telford breathed. “I want you to feel good.”

“I feel really good.”

“Then let me make it last for you.”

The stupidest sex talk in the world, basically. Young wasn’t exactly a genius. But Telford came in his own hand, thinking about it: Young’s habit of rubbing his stubbly cheek, blind and restless, over and over again against the same spot, leaving a mark that would last for a week. The way the circling of his arm meant that when he’d finished, he clenched Telford against him, and it had been like being in a headlock, like being almost-killed, a little bit, except that Telford had known that Young would never hurt him.

* * *

Rush throws the glass of water at Telford, the second time. It’s not actually glass, so it doesn’t break. It just bounces off the wall and rolls across the floor.

“You’ve already got what you want,” he hisses. “I’m doing your _fucking_ experiments. I’m not even protesting anymore. Do you see me protesting? No. So you can just fuck off and stop pretending to be my friend.”

“I can bring you a book,” Telford says, unmoved. “If you think you might want one.”

Rush makes a pretty good go at throwing one of the divans across the room.

* * *

The thing is, every day, when they’re done in the lab, Telford goes back to his quarters, and then he isn’t sure what to do.

What did he do on Earth?

Walked around his house. His stylish house, with its immaculate, minimalist decor. Every chair and lamp and ornamental tulip was something he’d chosen, mostly for its ability to say nothing about him. The books on his shelves were sorted by color; he updated his electronics yearly; he threw the flowers out as soon as they started to wilt. He had a lot of money, because he didn’t live frugally but he was picky. And the Lucian Alliance insisted on giving him money, because it made them nervous that he hadn’t asked for it. So he could afford to buy the luxury items that, to him, had always communicated ease and comfort. But they weren’t made to be used. Or else using them just always felt flat.

Sometimes the most exciting part of his night had been getting a glass of water in the kitchen, pressing a Juliska tumbler against the icemaker to fill it and feeling the glass gradually turn cold in his hand.

He’d had a woman in Colorado Springs, Yessica, who cleaned for him once a week. She’d assumed at first that he spoke Spanish and then, when she found out he didn’t, she assumed for some reason that he wanted to learn. She spoke to him like he was a child, clearly enunciating her words and lifting objects up, telling him their names. _Tenedor_ , she’d say, showing him a fork. And then a spoon: _cuchara. Silla. Mesa. Alfombra. Pared._ He’d usually planned to work when she was there, but had trouble coming up with excuses to leave her presence when she was talking to him.

She seemed to think that if she kept talking to him, at some point he was going to start magically understanding, like the grammar of the language would filter through to him. _Parece muy cansado_ , she’d say to him, frowning. _Demasiado trabajo, señor Telford._ Or: _Qué linda esa flor! Siempre compra las mas lindas flores; qué buen gusto tiene._ He’d wanted to pay her for the conversation, even though it wasn’t really conversation, or for the lessons. He’d thought: She doesn't have to do that. But he hadn’t known how.

There is no Yessica in space. But he doesn’t really need her. All he’s got is a suite: three compact little rooms. Anyway, it’s only a temporary installation, till they manage to go through the gate.

The government will take his house on Earth, he knows, if they haven’t already. He wishes he’d been able to leave it to Yessica, though God knows what she’d do with it. She has kids, probably. He remembers seeing a picture at some point. _Mi hija, mi hija, mi hijo_ , she’d said.

* * *

It’s pretty clear, by the third time, that Rush isn’t going to be doing a lot of reading.

“I don’t know how I got here,” he says, looking panicked and stumbling backwards in a jerky motion. “How the fuck did I get here? Where’s Young?”

“It’s okay,” Telford says, setting the glass of water down and holding his hands up. “We’ve been over all of this. If you just stay calm and lie down for a minute, I’m sure you’ll remember.

He’s right, as it turns out, but that doesn’t make it easier seeing Rush’s face crumple when it happens. Or going back to his quarters and looking at the stack of books by his bedside and realizing that there’s no one in a twelve-light-year radius he can have a conversation about them with.

* * *

There’d been a few things that he always knew he was going to want to bring with him from Earth. (He thinks he’ll be able to go back eventually, when they understand that he wasn’t really on the Lucian Alliance’s side, that he was just doing what needed to be done, but it’s going to take a while, and space isn’t that exciting.)

The books: Dostoevsky, Hemingway. _Heart of Darkness. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man._ A few others.

An arrowhead he’d picked up outside of Abiquiu.

A photo from the day he got commissioned.

A stalk of purple lupine flowers, carefully preserved, from Young’s wedding.

It’d been outdoors, the wedding, in Wyoming, at the Young family ranch. Telford had managed to make his escape from it sometime just after twilight, stumbling out through the big pale explosions of sagebrush, away from the paper lanterns and the billowing tent and the white organza, _white_ being the operative word in the whole fucking endeavor— not that he’d noticed he was one of four or five guys who’d somehow managed to miss the color-matching memo, or that all of them were in uniform. “It’s so nice that the Air Force has introduced Everett to such a _diverse_ group of people,” one of Young’s aunts had said to him, and Telford’s mouth had twitched. He’d wanted to laugh, because it was so of-a-piece, so predictable, _oh, Everett,_ but instead he’d left, so he wouldn’t have to watch Young dance with his blushing cowgirl bride.

This had been approximately sixteen months before he and Young started fucking, if you didn’t count the time in Denver.

The hills had been full of wildflowers and the light hadn’t gone down yet. He’d watched insects settle over the grass in the coming dark. He’d sat on a rock and taken a swig from his beer bottle. The sky had been eggshell-speckled with stars. He’d felt extremely calm and very peaceful. He liked being away from people. He’d go on vacation, he’d thought to himself, after this. Someplace cold. He also liked the cold. That was normal for someone who’d grown up where it was hot. People always wanted what they didn’t have.

After a while, he heard Young call his name from over at the wedding. “David! Where’s David?” Young said. Then again: “David!”

Telford experienced, for a moment, the strange sense that he was not the person Young was calling, like there was another David Telford right next to him— a shadow-self who heard himself addressed and got up and walked back through the sagebrush, while the real Telford remained behind. At the wedding, a pink-faced Young wrestled the shadow-Telford back into the glowing white tent. On the hillside, the real Telford, who had not been summoned, broke off a stalk of flowers. He breathed in the scent of wild things. The air grew colder. He belonged out here, in the dark, he thought.

* * *

“I could read to you,” Telford suggests. “If it’d help.”

But for some reason that infuriates Rush.

“If you fucking so much as open a book in my presence,” he says, “I will slit my own fucking wrists if I have to use my fingernails to do it.”

Telford hadn’t been sure until then that Rush knew why they’d taken away his belt and shoes.

* * *

Kiva’s always trying to get him to fuck her, not because she wants him— a person in her position can’t afford to want anyone— but because she thinks it’ll give her some kind of leverage over him. He gives in only once, right after they start the experiments, when he’s been drinking and she, probably knowing it, knocks on his door.

She pushes him back onto the couch and climbs into his lap, unbuttoning his uniform jacket while her hips are already coaxing at him, getting him hard. The Lucians think it shows respect for a man to fuck a woman— something about the obsession with reproduction that they got left with after centuries of Goa’uld oppression— so maybe he’s getting tripped up by cultural mores here and giving her the upper hand when he lets her sit on his cock and ride him. But it feels incredible. He hasn’t had sex since— since. There’s something about being inside another person’s body, hand or cunt or mouth or ass, that’s perverse in its intimacy, almost too much for him, like he’s right on the edge of feeling sickened by it, or repulsed, or maybe just scared.

Kiva runs her hands through his hair and jerks his head back, making him gasp. “This is nice,” she says, in a voice that implies otherwise, “but are you going to fuck me like a man?”

Telford feels like she’s slapped him. Fortunately, that doesn’t damage his libido. “God, you’re a bitch,” he says.

“Yes,” she says. “It’s one of my charms.”

She’s fucking him the way you fuck when you’re talking to someone, admitting him into her body in short slow slick strokes. So he shoves in hard, and then he picks her up and pushes her back on the coffee table, so he can get on his knees and go deep enough to make her hiss. He pounds at her like that for a while, mindlessly, letting his dick take over. It’s good enough. But her mouth does something, or her face twists, and suddenly he’s seeing Rush in that goddamn laboratory, contorting under the electricity, his face pinched in pain. He makes a noise.

Kiva narrows her eyes. “No,” she says. “Here. With me.”

She tightens around him, wrapping her legs around his waist and then raising one over his shoulder, so that the angle changes, and he sort of can’t pull out now. He’s too deep, and he’s too close to coming, and he’s not a master of denial. Her body feels really goddamn good. She’s good at it, good at sex, good at knowing just what he needs and how he needs it.

“Come on,” she says. “That’s it. Show me that you’re good enough to fuck me, or next time I won’t let you. You’ll come to me holding your cock, begging to put it in me, and I won’t let you, not unless you show me you deserve it. Are you a man? Are you a soldier? Show me that you have what it takes. Show me. Show me. That’s not good enough, David. Do you deserve it? I don’t think you deserve it.”

Telford comes with a staggered, protracted gasp.

Later, after he’s pulled out of her, he says, “Fuck you.”

“Oh, don’t be angry,” Kiva says. “After all, you got what you wanted. And I’m not talking about the sex. You need to take your mind off Rush.”

Telford gets up off the couch, half-naked and sticky and disgusted. For no reason at all, he feels betrayed. “I need to _take my mind off Rush?_ ” he repeats.

“Stop visiting him. Stop wasting your time feeling guilty. He’s not here to be your playmate.”

“I know why he’s here,” Telford says.

* * *

“What’s happened to Ginn?” Rush asks.

“She’s alive,” Telford says. He’s sitting against the wall with his knees pulled up to his chest, watching Rush in the green glow of the room’s pseudo-fire. In the dark the artificial flames look like the aurora borealis. Telford’s never seen them— the Northern Lights. He’s managed to spend most of his career in outer space, but he’s never stood at the top of his own planet for long enough to just watch the sky. Or Antarctica, for that matter. Just day trips to the base. “I’ve already told you. Actually, I’ve told you three or four times.”

“Yes, but—“ Rush makes a fretful noise. “What’s _happened_ to her? I want to see her. I want to speak with her.”

“You can’t.” Kiva won’t tell Telford what she’s done with Ginn, only that the girl’s been punished. He hasn’t asked follow-up questions. It’s not his business, is it? It’s like one of those Afghan hill tribes. You don’t get involved, because you’re not involved. You’re just an outside observer. A neutral observer. Like a scientist.

Rush seems to accept the answer, but then his brow furrows.

Oh, here we go again, Telford thinks.

“Where’s Young?” Rush asks.

* * *

He remembers being— oh, nine or ten years old, probably, and going hiking up west of the Rio Grande, about halfway between Los Alamos and Santa Fe. It must’ve been a school trip. He’d strayed away from the group, like always. He’d stumbled across what looked like a memorial, like one of the historical markers they stick on the roadside that tell you what happened on such-and-such date. It was three pillars, almost waist-high, and a little metal coin that read: BURIED RADIOACTIVE MAT / NO EXCAVATION PRIOR TO 2142 AD. Already, then, he’d known what that meant, _radioactive_. He’d been smart, even though he’d tried to hide it, because it unsettled his parents, and he’d wanted to be the son that they’d thought they were going to get.

You could walk right over the metal coin, between the pillars, which seemed amazing— that radioactive things could be in the world, that they didn’t have to be behind a fence. He’d put his feet on top of it. He’d felt a sort of primal connection to whatever was buried underneath. For just one guilty moment he wished that he could crack open the drum and let its contents out into the world. Then everything would be ruined; everything would be toxic; everything would be contaminated in some small and invisible way, just like him.

He never told anyone about this wish, and looking back on it years later, he's surprised to find that his ideas have changed. What he wants now is live in the era when it might be possible to bring up what’s been buried, when it will no longer kill whatever it touches. At the same time, he doesn't think that there will ever be such an era. Or if there ever is, he thinks, it’s so distant that it’ll make no difference, at any rate.

* * *

“Why are you always lying on the floor?” Telford asks Rush. “You’ve got a bed. You’ve got couches. You’ve got a ton of furniture. I promise I haven’t touched every inch of it.”

“It ineffectively disperses heat,” Rush says in an exhausted voice, from where he’s got his face pressed against the stone. “And regulating my body temperature exhausts me. If I were cold, I’d sleep on the bed. But these days I tend to be running a fever.”

Telford looks away abruptly. “Yeah. I know,” he says.

He’s not sure what’s in his voice that makes Rush turn his head to look at him. Rush’s eyes are dark, like a deer’s eyes, that same kind of nervous, drowning darkness.

“You knew it was going to be like this,” Rush says. “Why don’t you just fuck off? It’d be easier if you left me in the lab.”

“You think?” Telford leans against the wall, trying to project disagreement.

Rush drops his head against the floor again. “Well,” he says after a moment, “it’s too late, anyway.”

“I don’t believe in too late.”

“This, I suspect, is one of your numerous problems.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Telford doesn’t get a response. He sighs. “Nick. What does that mean?”

Rush turns over onto his side and hunches into himself. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t feel well, David. It’s the middle of the night. At least, I assume it’s the middle of the night, if you’re here. Fuck off, won’t you?”

“Sorry,” Telford says.

“I know you’re sorry,” Rush says. “But it’s not doing either of us any good, is it?”

“No,” Telford says. “I suppose it’s not.”

* * *

Mostly he doesn’t miss anything he left behind on Earth. The more he thinks about that, the stranger it seems. After all, he’d had a whole house. Every room of the house had been full of objects. The objects had been expensive. He’d taken out insurance on them. If a fire had swept through Colorado Springs, or an avalanche had come down off the mountains, he would’ve been able to have them all replaced. Now he doesn’t know why he bothered. Because he was supposed to, he guesses. He’d told Young the truth: for a while, he’d thought that he could fake it until he made it.

He remembers having a conversation with Rush about that. Back in California. Rush had been going on about something he called Searle’s Chinese Room. “Is that a pretentious math problem or a pretentious logic problem?” Telford had asked.

Rush’s mouth had quirked. “It’s a pretentious thought problem,” he’d said. “A man is locked in a room with a Chinese dictionary so complete that it’s able to simulate a translation algorithm. Someone outside the room submits questions in Chinese to him through the door, and the man uses the dictionary to construct answers to them. So elegantly constructed is the dictionary-stroke-algorithm that the observer outside the room believes that the man in the room understands Chinese. The question then becomes: does he?”

“This is why no one likes philosophers,” Telford had said.

“Another question,” Rush had gone one, as though Telford hadn’t spoken, “is whether he _learns_ Chinese through the process, and if so, at what exact point we would say he understands it.”

“So what are you saying, exactly? That it all comes down to just— fake it till you make it?”

Rush had shrugged. He’d looked tired. “It certainly sounds simple, doesn’t it? But in practice there are some things one finds it difficult to learn.”

“Unless you’re locked in a room and forced to learn them,” Telford had said.

* * *

“I brought you some ice,” Telford says. He drops to the floor beside Rush, who’s shivering with nausea.

Rush frowns, rolling half-over and squinting up at him. “I know you did. You already did. Ages ago.”

“No. Just now,” Telford says.

“Oh.” Rush looks lost. “I hate you,” he says uncertainly.

“I know you do.”

“I wasn’t sure if that was still the case.”

“Pretty sure that’s always going to be the case,” Telford says. He offers Rush a piece of ice.

Rush looks relieved. He takes the ice. “Thank you,” he says. “These days, consistency is in such short supply.”

* * *

After about a week has passed, Telford cleans his quarters. Or he cleans them as best he can. They don’t really need it— the military’s made him a tidy person, and offworld bases are free of a lot of the types of dirt that cause problems Earthside. But: he might as well, he thinks. He’s got the time. He’s in the habit. It builds discipline. That’s what his training instructors back in Basic used to say.

He doesn’t have any cleaning products, of course, so the best he can do is take an old t-shirt and wipe everything down with it. His books, the desk, his computer, the bedframe, the bronze walls.

He laughs at first, imagining Yessica criticizing his efforts. She’d probably be horrified he wasn’t using bleach, or that he was doing it in the first place when he so obviously lacked the generational knowledge of thousands of tiny… oh, he doesn’t know, Guatemalan, whatever… women fighting to keep the jungle back. She probably could have taught him. She probably would’ve taught him. She was worried about him: a bachelor with no kids. How on Earth would he take care of himself? “It’s all right,” he should’ve said. “I can do it by myself. Just teach me.” Then she would’ve showed him, breaking it down into the simplest steps, the simplest lessons, things that even he could understand, making sure to enunciate the syllables that he should know already, until he finally picked up the trick of it.

But he does okay, anyway, with the old t-shirt. He runs it over the bronze wall opposite his bed until he’s convinced himself that it’s shinier than it was.

He can see the reflection of his face in it, dim and blurry but present. He reaches out to touch it. He doesn’t look at himself a lot. When he was a kid he did, first because he was curious about why he didn’t look like his parents, who were sturdy white working-class Catholic stock, then because he was curious about who he did look like. He didn’t know who his biological parents had been— he didn’t remember them, even though he’d been three when they’d given him up.

He’d trace his eyelids, his cheekbones; he’d touch the black hair that grew thick and smooth and straight. He could be Apache, he’d thought. He could be Mixtec. He could be Yaqui. He could be a lot of things. Later, the Air Force was a simpler solution. When you were in the Air Force, you were just Air Force.

Now he finds himself following the line of his cheekbones again. He’s lost weight. The weeks underground turned him sallow. He needs a haircut, probably, but good luck with that. His eyes look very dark in the muddy bronze, animal-dark. He can’t seem to see what’s behind them.

“Who are you?” he whispers, leaning his forehead against the reflection.

* * *

“Why do you come here, anyway?” Rush asks.

“I don’t know,” Telford says. This is a true statement. “Nostalgia? I’m bored? I can’t sleep? Who knows; maybe I just missed you.”

“You _missed_ me?” Rush says, amused and incredulous, and for a moment, it’s the old Rush: scathing and contemptuous even when he was a thin scrape of a person, raked over the merciless asphalt of everything that’d happened to him.

Telford’s the only one who knew him when he was like that, really. When he was _really_ like that. Sure, in Colorado he was a fucking mess, but in California there was almost nothing left. Like one of those eggshell ornaments people make for Easter: brittle and sharp enough to cut you, but hollow and the right size to crush in your hand. Maybe Telford had thought that this Rush would be like that, too— the Rush he put through the protocol— that he’d survived the first thing, his wife dying, so he could survive this too. It hadn’t occurred to Telford that there might be cumulative damage, that there might be a body burden he needed to take into account.

Rush had been the first person Telford had ever met that he wasn’t afraid of hurting.

He sees the irony in the situation. But walking through the streets of Berkeley, it’d actually seemed to make a kind of sense. There was _that_ world: thin and mannered and artificial, like an elaborate stage play, and then there was the world _they_ lived in, the world that no one else was equipped to live in, the world where Telford, suddenly, was no longer alone.

He does miss Rush, he thinks.

“No,” he says. “Of course not.”

Rush looks wistful. “It’s all right,” he says. “Sometimes I miss me.”

* * *

He does know where Yessica’s from, actually. He doesn’t know why he pretends he doesn’t. She’s from Chimaltenango. She hadn’t been a cleaning lady there. She’d been a dressmaker. She’d shown him where the needles had left scars on her fingers.

* * *

“Do you want me to stop?” Telford asks. “Coming by, I mean.”

Rush mulls this over from where he’s lying, limp as a dishrag, on the floor. “I appreciate the water,” he says somewhat indistinctly. “And at least when you’re here, I know it’s night. Even if I don’t know _which_ night.”

“I’m glad I make such a convenient alarm clock.”

Rush ignores this comment. He says, “You don’t sleep.”

Telford says, “Not much.”

“No. Nor me.”

Telford sits in silence with what he wants to say. There’s a whole category of statements he doesn’t make, as a rule; words that he finds distasteful for reasons he doesn’t examine. He substitutes other kinds of statements when he can, unconcerned that the original meaning is almost always lost in the swap-out. He tried, didn’t he? He made the effort. No one could convincingly argue that it was his fault.

“You should sleep,” he says finally. “Why can’t you sleep? Is it a side effect?”

“I can’t remember.”

“How can you not _remember_?” Telford asks.

“I find that it’s increasingly easy to do.” Rush turns on his side and draws his fingertips across the floor’s glossy surface. For a moment, in the dim light, it almost looks like he’s resting on top of a body of water, and letting his hand trail shallowly through it. “Memory, after all, is only relevant within an ontological framework that understands existence as a linear progression. We remember what _has_ happened and _is_ not happening any longer.”

Telford is unsettled. “Are you saying that’s not how it works?”

Rush makes an exasperated face, wrinkling his nose. He reaches up to straighten his glasses, and the floor is just the floor and his hand is just doing what hands do again. “How should I know? Honestly, it’s a bit much to ask me to explain the secrets of the universe when you spend most of your time fucking with my brain.”

Telford goes silent again after that, for a while. He furrows his thick hair with his hands. He feels so goddamn tired. “I wish there was something I could do to help you sleep,” he says.

“I know you do,” Rush says.

“I mean—“

“I know what you mean,” Rush says.

* * *

“I don’t want you visiting him,” Kiva says to him, cornering him after he leaves the lab one day.

“It’s not up to you what I do with my time,” Telford tells her.

“It’s compromising your judgment.”

This seems like a wild accusation, considering that Telford just sat through a twelve-hour session of watching a doctor run currents of electricity through Rush’s brain.

“You’re losing your mind,” he says. He sidesteps her.

She catches his arm. Her eyes are narrow and dark. Her nails are like talons. “This is not about you,” she says. “It’s about a larger mission that you’re putting at risk with your behavior. You’re endangering the Alliance.”

“I don’t give a fuck about the Lucian Alliance,” Telford says. “You think I’m playing for your team? I’m playing for nobody’s team but my own. And don’t pretend like that surprises you, because you’ve made it pretty damn clear I’m not welcome.”

“I don’t know how much more _welcome_ I could make you,” Kiva says, stepping closer and running a hand up his side, just in case he might’ve mistaken her meaning.

“I’m tired,” Telford says curtly. “And I’m going to bed.” He brushes past her.

She seems to accept the implicit rejection, but as he’s walking away, she says, “What happened to the fate of the universe, David? That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” There’s something mocking and unpleasant in her voice.

He ignores her, because that _is_ why he’s here. That’s always been why he’s here. Everything else is just incidental. It’s not his fault if he can’t make her believe that.

It must be some kind of cultural difference, he thinks.

* * *

“Does the fire bother you?” Telford asks. “I know you’re always running a fever. I can get it taken out if you want. If that would help you sleep.”

Rush squints blearily at the fire. Blurrily, he says, “I really don’t mind it. In fact, I find it rather restful.”

“Not as good as one of your fires, of course,” Telford says, aiming for deadpan, and then wonders if he should’ve said it.

But Rush just shakes his head and sighs. “You’re still such a bastard.”

“I know,” Telford says, and finds that his throat unexpectedly hurts. “I try.”

“Consistent.”

“That’s me.” Telford drops his head back against the wall. This has become his default posture. It feels like the only way he can carry the weight. He stares at the spectral green flames that lick at the bowl of black stones. He says, “It reminds me of the Northern Lights. I always wanted to see them, and somehow I never got a chance. I think that’s why I picked it.”

“Charged particles,” Rush says— whispers, almost. “Raining down into the atmosphere. Like water spilling over the rim of an unsteady cup. Who is jostling the universe’s hand?” He has his hands tucked under his head. He’s curled up on his side like a kid at a camp-out; all that’s missing from the picture is a plastic lantern and a sleeping bag.

Telford feels a sharp pain that he is slow to recognize as fondness. “You’re such a math guy,” he says.

Rush blinks drowsily at him. “Am I?”

“Yeah. You always were. I always liked it about you.”

Rush seems to consider this. “You are not a math guy,” he says. There’s a note of uncertainty in his voice, like maybe he can’t actually remember whether Telford is or isn’t, or even who Telford is to start with.

“No,” Telford says. “I’m not a math guy.”

“What kind of guy are you?”

Telford reaches out and rests a hand against Rush’s ankle. It’s a weirdly unerotic touch. It makes him feel almost tearful. He doesn’t know why that’s happening. It’s just a couple of inches of skin and the stupid fucking curve of his hand.

Rush sighs. “That’s nice,” he murmurs.

Telford says quietly, “I guess I don’t know what kind of guy I am.”

* * *

Later he sits in his silent quarters, cleaning his gun. Cleaning his gun is one of the only hobbies he has left. He finds it really peaceful: taking something apart and putting it together again, practicing the care and attention that the pieces need to have so that they’ll function.

His dad used to take him hunting when he was a kid. Not a lot; they weren’t like Young’s family, who thought that antlers solved every home decorating conundrum. But they went. Telford would lie motionless on the carpet of pine needles, squinting through his rifle. He’d watch animals moving, far-off. The air was always still and cool up there in the mountains, not like it was at home in Albuquerque. Deer picked their way hesitantly across rocks and shallow creek beds. They were so beautiful, with their wet eyes and flickering ears. They looked like ballerinas, balancing on just one toe of each foot.

The first time he bagged one on his own, he was seventeen and about to head to college. He’d skipped a year of school, was why he was so young. Everyone had been so overeffusive about it, saying how proud his parents must be of him, saying how much he’d overcome. What had he overcome? he’d thought. Being brown? His parents had never hit him; sure, they didn’t like him, but they’d always put food on the table, no matter how hard it got. He had all his limbs attached. He hadn’t survived cancer. But sometimes the person talking knew his story, so he knew that what they were saying was: It’s good that you’re paying your parents back for taking a chance on a gently-used product. You’ve done so well for somebody who was an in-store return.

He’d told his dad that he was going to do AFROTC. And they’d gone hunting. His dad didn’t talk much. He was an old-fashioned guy, and also just old, on the older side for a parent. So they’d been lying there in the woods, both of them staring down their guns, and his dad had said, “I know we haven’t been… close. We haven’t always… understood one another.” He had this way of talking, like he was chewing up the second half of the sentence, trying to grind it up into small enough pieces to spit out. “But I think it’s… a fine thing you’re doing. A very fine thing. Not many people… choose to do the hard thing.”

Telford had watched as a deer approached. It was a young deer, maybe even a yearling. Its ears still looked too big for its head. It bent its graceful neck towards the water. Its wet nose sent ripples outwards, a circle of effects.

“Thing is,” his dad said, “when something’s hard… that’s all the more reason to do it. A lot of folks… don’t understand that.”

Telford wanted to stay there, in the moment at which the deer was drinking. The air was cold. The ground smelled good. Birds were singing in the trees. When he pulled the trigger, it would all be over. But it would all be over soon anyways. It wasn’t going to last. And a strange anxiety pushed at him to go ahead and make it happen, to do it, _do it,_ as though he couldn’t have it, so this was the next best thing. Maybe he didn’t want somebody else to ruin it, like they would if they got their hands on it. Maybe he was just selfish, and if he couldn’t keep it forever, he was damned if he was going to let it exist. Killing something, he thought, was one way of owning it, sort of.

“I’m proud of you,” his dad said.

Telford pulled the trigger and watched the deer fall. The sound seemed to travel from a distance. The birds scattered, disturbing branches. There was a smell of gunpowder and piñon; hot metal, and then blood.

* * *

“Perhaps you could tell me a story,” Rush says, in a voice that’s thin and strained by nausea.

Telford adjusts the cold cloth he’s holding to Rush’s neck. “A story?”

Rush says, “If you wanted to help me sleep.”

“I don’t think we have a storytelling kind of relationship,” Telford says.

He feels Rush laugh silently: muscles flinching and relaxing under his hands. Then Rush is throwing up again in the bowl he’s holding, his thin back going taut with the effort and sweat breaking out on his skin. “Fuck,” he whispers when, presumably, there’s nothing left he can physically force out of his stomach.

“Yeah,” Telford says.

Rush slumps against him, exhausted. “How long have I been here?”

Telford tries to figure the answer out. He hasn’t had any reason to pay attention to the Earth calendar. It’s not like he’s tracking a lot of social obligations. “About two weeks,” he says.

“Temporal sequencing is difficult for me.”

“I know,” Telford says.

“It feels like it’s been forever.”

“I know,” Telford says again. He puts an arm around Rush and scrapes his damp hair back from his forehead.

“I can’t fucking figure you out, you know,” Rush says.

“Well,” Telford says, “we’re not hitting each other anymore.”

Rush laughs, and then winces. “I think I want to lie down.”

It’s the chemicals that make him sick, Telford thinks, and not the seizures, although the seizures are getting worse. He thought they’d be done by now, finished with the protocol. He didn’t think that Rush would get this sick. It’s easier when things are over fast, because it limits your options. You know what you have to do. It is what it is.

He’d finally convinced Kiva to bring the girl in today, the one that Rush had gotten to defect. She’d looked— but it wasn’t any of his goddamn business. He had to keep reminding himself of that. Anyway, Kiva— or one of the scientists she wouldn’t ever let Telford speak to, always paranoid about conspiracies that might cut her out— had thought the girl would make things work, but she hadn’t.

He helps Rush unclench himself from the furled little crouch he’d been in, and uncurl himself against the floor. Rush makes a sound of relief when his forehead touches the stone.

“Better?” Telford asks.

“I like the minimal crystal growth,” Rush says, a little drowsily. “It’s quiet.”

“Right.” Telford shakes his head.

“I still hate you, you understand.”

“Yeah, but do you hate me now, or are you going to hate me in the future, or did you hate me once upon a time?” Telford says, ribbing him gently. “Maybe you _would_ have hated me, in the subjunctive, or you _will_ hate me, but only under certain conditions. Maybe—“

“Don’t,” Rush says, coming fully awake and sounding distressed.

“—Sorry,” Telford says after a pause.

Rush folds his arms over his head. “I can’t keep putting it all in order. I don’t have the infrastructure. I’m not built for this kind of ontology. I don’t know why I wanted this. I don’t remember. Why did you bring me here?”

“You know why,” Telford says.

“No.”

“To save the universe. To save the universe, or— fucking whatever.” Telford closes his eyes.

“That certainly sounds definite.”

Telford sighs. It seems to come up from the soles of his feet, that exhalation. “What the fuck do you want me to say, Nick?”

Rush stares at him with wild, nervous eyes for a second— then furrows his brow and says, “What do you mean? Did I ask you a question?”

Telford can’t stand it. He gets up; crosses the room, then paces back slowly, clenching his hands into slow fists. After a while he leans his forehead against the wall and breathes. “You know, ultimately,” he says in a strained voice, “ultimately, it all comes down to what you do when you’ve got something in your crosshairs. Right? Most people— well, most people, they’re too scared to pick up the gun in the first place. Fuck ‘em. Jackson— he’ll pick up the gun, but he’ll look at it like it’s something dirty, and then he’ll look at you that way. And Young—“ He chokes on a laugh that wants to turn into a pained sound. And then it does turn into a pained sound. “He sees something good in those crosshairs, and he puts the gun down. He doesn’t want to shoot. But we’re not all Young. Okay, Nick? Okay? Some of us, we see something good and it just makes us want to pull the trigger faster. Before someone tells us we’re not man enough to do it. That’s the way we are.”

He doesn’t think that Rush is actually following him.

He hunches back down to the floor, in the spot where he’d been sitting.

Rush studies him for a long time. His face is affectless. Finally he reaches out and picks up Telford’s unresisting hand. He folds the fingers into the shape of a gun, and points it at his own forehead. “Boom,” he says.

“Yeah,” Telford says. He feels his mouth twist. He tries to pull his hand back, but Rush keeps ahold of it.

Rush shakes his head. He bends Telford’s wrist till the gun’s two fingers are pointed straight at their owner. “Boom,” he says softly.

Telford lets a huffed breath escape him, short and ugly. “Thanks, but that’s not what I meant.”

“No,” Rush says. “I know.” He lets Telford’s hand drop. “I suppose the joke’s on you. You could’ve just asked me. Some of us don’t particularly care what’s in the crosshairs; all we want is to pull the trigger first. But _we_ want to pull the trigger.”

“It’s not a very funny joke,” Telford says. He lifts his arm so that Rush can crawl under it, shivering.

“No,” Rush says, his voice thin and exhausted, leaning against him. “On balance, I have to agree.”

* * *

Later that night he sleeps for an hour or so, and dreams that he’s wandering his house in Colorado. It’s empty of life, as always, dead-aired and immaculate. He’s trying to find the room with the dictionary in it, the one he can use to communicate with the outside, the one you can use to convince everyone else that you’re a person. Because that’s part of the experiment, isn’t it? Rush’s Chinese Room thing. Telford had looked it up later. It was actually all about computers, and whether something that’s not a person can really mean what it says when it’s saying, “I believe you,” or, “That hurts,” or, “I’m tired,” or, “I love you, please don’t leave.” Like being a person means you have to feel a certain way, be able to feel a certain way. Telford’s afraid he doesn’t. But if he finds the dictionary, maybe he can. He’ll have to go on pretending for a while, but not forever. He’ll learn to do all the things he doesn’t know how to do now, all the right things.

But the house gets larger and larger; he keeps descending staircases, entering into room after open-plan room. All of them are filled with modernist furniture that he doesn’t remember buying; track lighting, tulips in black vases, chairs he’s never going to sit in, coffee-table books he doesn’t want to read. He feels bad because he doesn’t know how Yessica’s going to have time to clean it all. He didn’t mean to buy a house this big. He doesn’t know what to do with it now. He doesn’t know how to get rid of it.

He should just leave, he thinks— fuck the dictionary. He doesn’t need other people. But he can’t seem to find his way back out of the house.

He keeps walking. The air gets colder as he penetrates the underground. It starts to seem to him like there’s something he’s missing, something he’s not able to see. He looks uncertainly at the tulips, the track lighting, the Paul Klee painting in the hallway. He touches a book of Edward S. Curtis photographs. A hidden relation between the objects cries out for attention. He’s on the verge of understanding what it is. Almost, he thinks. Almost. He catches sight of his reflection in a mirror.

He wakes up soaked in sweat.

* * *

“Maybe it wasn’t really about that,” Telford says, watching Rush hum tunelessly to himself in the corner. He hums a lot these days. He’s doing something nervous, twitchy, and complicated with his hands. It looks weirdly non-Euclidean in the firelight.

Rush glances over at him absently. “What was about what?”

“About shooting you down before someone else made me do it. About showing that I didn’t care, that I had the nerve. Maybe it was what I told you in the first place, about wanting to make you better. Maybe I couldn’t do anything for myself, and I wanted to do it for you. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. Am I just telling myself that so I’ll feel better?” He drops his head back against the wall. “Because I don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Feel better.”

Rush hums a different note and hunches over. His long hair, looking more than a little unwashed and shaggy, falls forward and occludes his face. He took a couple of baths the first week, opting for the minor comfort of cleanliness over the satisfaction he seemed to get from telling Telford to fuck off, but lately his attention span’s been too shot. It doesn’t seem like a great idea to get too close to him with a razor, so his stubble’s turning into a soft, scraggly hobo beard. His clothes are a mess, too. He had a nosebleed this morning, right after the day’s first seizure, but he tried to bite Telford when Telford made a go of giving him a clean shirt.

Telford sighs. “I guess it doesn’t really matter. Hey— come on, you need a bath.”

Rush ignores him.

Telford gets up and crosses the room to him. “You’ll feel better. More like you.”

“More like me,” Rush whispers. He looks at Telford with haunted eyes. “You fail to see—“

Telford waits for the rest of the sentence and then, finally, says, “What?”

“—the two things you wanted were always going to be the same thing. Were they? They are. They always will be. No matter how hard we try, nothing is created or destroyed.” Rush goes back to staring at his hands.

“I don’t know what that means,” Telford says.”Come on, Diogenes, the baths’ll be empty. We can have all the hot water to ourselves.”

Rush frowns severely at him. “ _Don’t_ call me ‘Diogenes,’” he says. But he gets unsteadily to his feet and lets Telford take his arm to support him. Together, like that, they go to the baths.

The Lucians bathe communally, kind of like Romans, in big stone rooms where you sit on shelves in the water. It’s nice, actually; better than barracks showers. And Telford was right: this late at night, there’s no one else in the baths. The room feels hollow as an eggshell, warm and very quiet. Artificial torches glow on the black stone and the surface of the water. Telford helps Rush with his clothes and then takes his own off. He’s conscious of his nakedness. A week ago he’d’ve felt weird about the scar on his chest, but now it doesn’t seem to matter. There’s really no point in trying to hide his sins. There’s no point in trying to hide anything anymore.

It doesn’t feel like he expected.

He slides into the pool, where Rush is already sitting with drowsy eyes, half-sleeping. “Told you you’d feel better,” he says.

“Mm.” Rush is hunched down in the water, his eyes absently following the stray seeds of light that the torches send glancing over the surface. He reaches out with a lazy fingertip and touches one.

“C’mere, I’ll wash your hair for you.”

Rush slides silently over. Telford steadies him with a touch to his side. It’s weird how plain this feels, how ordinary: touching Rush’s bare wet skin, heedless of his nakedness; noting the ghostly freckles on his back that speak of an ambivalent relationship with sunlight.

He spoons water over Rush’s neckline when Rush bends his head forwards. The water makes a soft glassy sound, like a small river. Telford spies more freckles as Rush’s hair gets wet and slopes over his shoulder, the individual hairs running together like an ink spill. He charts one particularly erratic constellation with a fingertip. It makes him smile faintly, the unlikeliness of Rush’s freckles.

“I think you’re the whitest person I’ve ever met,” he says.

“I come from a cold climate,” Rush murmurs.

“I know,” Telford says. And then, without any transition, he starts to cry.

He doesn’t think Rush notices. It’s pretty much silent at first. He thinks that any second he’ll stop, because he’s not a crier. He hasn’t cried in— he doesn’t remember the last time he cried. He was probably a kid. He’d had a dog, Junior; he’d cried when Junior had died. His parents had been really concerned. They didn’t want him to get labeled as someone who was emotional, or unstable, maybe in part because of the race thing, or because of the adopted thing, and that was the worst part: that they were concerned. Not angry; not disappointed. He couldn’t stand for them to be concerned. It seemed to him like any emotion expended on their part was a balance that he was eventually going to have to pay back, a debt he hadn’t asked to carry. He couldn’t afford for them to care. From then on he made a point of never being too demanding. All his efforts went into controlling himself, being a quiet kid.

But now he can’t keep quiet. The breath catches and and makes a raw sound in his throat.

Rush twists to look at him. His brows furrows. He says, uncertain, “You’re upset.”

Telford laughs raggedly. Another sobbing breath struggles its way out of him. He says, his voice breaking, “I don’t know what to do, Nick.”

Rush stares at him and doesn’t speak.

Telford fists angrily at his eyes. “I should probably just let you drown me or something," he says, "huh? Would you like that? Except that I don’t think you’d make it out of here alive. And Young’s the one I really owe it to to—“ Feeling helpless, he sucks the breath back into his lungs. He can’t even bring himself to finish what he’s saying.

Rush reaches out and touches Telford’s shoulder. His hand is damp and hot. His thumb brushes back and forth gently against Telford’s throat. “If it helps,” he says, “I still hate you.”

Telford laughs wetly. “Actually, I think it might help a little.”

There’s a soft splashing noise as Rush kneels up on the ledge, awkwardly balancing with a leg on either side of Telford’s hips, and then— to Telford’s astonishment— Rush leans forward and lays his head in the crook of Telford’s neck. Rush doesn’t say anything. Telford can feel their naked bodies pressed together under the water. It’s like they’re floating in the darkness. He brings his arms up around Rush. He doesn’t think he’s ever been this physically close to somebody. For sure not without fucking. He’d always wanted to with Young, but it would’ve ruined everything. And by the time everything was ruined already, it was too late. He’d missed his chance.

They sit like that, wrapped in each other, with the warm edges of the water lapping at them, for a long time. It’s just the two of them, adrift in this lonely sea.

Eventually, Rush gets restless, of course.

“You haven’t been sitting here deciding to drown me after all, have you?” Telford says when he feels Rush fidget.

“I’ve been using your body to diffuse the radiational properties of the water,” Rush says.

At some point Telford’s stopped crying, although he still feels sick and stupid with it: shaky, wrung-out, with a clogged nose and swollen eyes. He runs a hand over his face. “Well,” he says, “I hope it did some good.”

Rush sits back and studies him. His face is grave and cryptic. “Yes,” he says. “I think it did.”

* * *

In his black-ceilinged, windowless bedroom on the Icarus planet, Telford sits holding the dried stalk of lupine in his hand. He’d had another dried flower at one point, a snapped-off branch of chamisa. It’d been in his wallet. He'd left it on Earth. He’d kept it because it reminded him of New Mexico, and the radioactive canyon where bunches of chamisas grow, their leaves and stems full of strontium-90, approximately 300,000 times more strontium-90 than an ordinary plant. Strontium-90 mimics calcium, so any body deficient in calcium will absorb it as part of the process of survival. That’s what happened to the chamisas. They’re deep-rooted plants, designed to thrive in the desert. They grow wide, and they grab whatever water they can get ahold of. In this case, that was liquid radioactive waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory— full of strontium-90. It’s always made him sad. We all have these chemical needs, these appetites, and if we can’t get what we need to eat, we’re not going to stop eating. We’re going to eat what we can get.

Why did he need reminding of that? He can't remember. And, anyway, he ended up with just the lupine.

When he holds it in his hand, he can smell the warm night and the sagebrush up in the hills. He wants to turn to the Young who is calling him through the dark, who has not been hurt yet. “I’m not the man you’re looking for,” he would say to that Young, “and I don’t think I’ll ever be that man. But I don’t want to stay out here forever.” He doesn’t know what Young would say. He doesn't know what he expects, or what he wants, even. Maybe just to be seen, although he when he closes his eyes, he pictures Young with his hand extended, offering to help him back through the ghostly bushes, over the sloping roots of the trees.

* * *

“God, I can’t stand this,” Rush says indistinctly, pushing his face against the floor. His cheeks are flushed with fever. “When are we going back to Earth? Where’s Young? I don’t want to do this any longer, David. Tell me a story.”

Telford touches the corner of a cold cloth to his forehead, which makes Rush wince and then sigh. “Don’t worry about it. Go to sleep.”

“Yes, but—“

“Imagine you’re in the mountains,” Telford says. “Really high up, so the air is freezing. You’re lying on the ground. It smells good. Like pine needles. You can hear birds singing up in the treetops. There’s a creek running nearby. Really cold water.”

“That sounds nice,” Rush whispers.

“Yeah,” Telford says in a low voice. “It does.”

“I think I’d rather be there.”

“Soon, maybe,” Telford says.

“It’s too warm here.”

“Just keep picturing it. You can touch the creek if you stretch your hand out. You can run your hand over the rocks.”

“Mm,” Rush says drowsily. He flexes his fingers against the black stone. The firelight makes his reflection move in a way that’s uncomfortable to look at, like it doesn’t quite match up with what Rush’s actual hand is doing, or even _could_ be doing. Telford watches it for a moment.

“Nick—“ he begins.

“What?” Rush mumbles. He blinks at Telford, dark-eyed and hazy and feverish. “I just wanted a drink of water.”

Telford brushes a damp strand of hair out of Rush’s face, and looks away.

“—Nothing,” he says.


	39. Fugue, Pt. 1: D

The SGC put Young in the same cell where they’d held Telford. Young wasn’t sure if that was intentional or not. He wasn’t sure what purpose it would serve, other than just— fucking with him, he guessed, which— to be fair— was a legitimate interrogation tactic.

Of course, there was nothing visible of Telford left in the cell. Someone had come through and cleaned out anything he’d left behind, probably while Young was being processed. It was only in Young’s head that there were these visceral traces: Telford’s bare ankles above the thin cotton of his slippers, the way he’d run his hands through his glossy black hair. _You went off on some stupid rescue mission,_ Telford had said, _that you had no business being on, that you weren’t prepared for—_

 _“What the fuck did you_ think _was going to happen?” Young says._

 

 

_He can see his reflection in a bronze wall._

_His lip is bloody._

 

 

_Telford makes a despairing noise._

 

 

_“I’m so sorry,” Telford whispers. His face is ashen._

 

 

 

 

 

 _“What the fuck did you_ think _was going to happen?” Young says. "_ _Jesus Christ, David—“_

 

 

_“I fucked up,” Telford says. “I’m so sorry.” His face is ashen._

 

_Young can’t feel his fingers.He tastes blood on his lip._

 

 

_Telford makes a despairing noise._

 

 

It was all just fragments.

 

 _“What the fuck did you_ think _was going to happen?” Young says loudly, jerking his hands against the magnetic cuffs. “Did you think I was just going to_ leave _you here?”_

 

_Telford makes a despairing noise._

 

 

_“Jesus Christ, David. Do you even know me? Who do you even think I am?”_

 

 

_“Everett,” Telford says, agonized._

 

 _“Did you think I was just going to_ leave _you here?”_

He felt nauseated, trying to reconstruct it. He knew that could happen. It was a side effect of the brainwashing.

He assumed that the SGC would send a team at some point who’d try to break through his conditioning, to find out what had really happened on Sest Bet.

He waited for them to haul in their briefcases, their laptops, their polygraphs and their alien machines. Or to haul him out somewhere else, shuffling in his blue scrubs and paper slippers.

But one day passed, and then another, and no one came.

* * *

On the third day, Jackson showed up wearing jeans and flip-flops and a magenta-and-silver sweater that looked like it’d been knitted out of craft store yarn. He stood in front of the glass barrier of the cell with his hands in his pockets. “Hey,” he said.

Young force himself to sit upright on the cot. For anyone else he’d’ve stood, probably, but he just couldn’t summon the energy with Jackson. “Hey,” he said.

“I, uh. Just wanted to come by and let you know that—“ Jackson faltered.

Young folded back onto the cot, feeling drained by even this minimal effort. “There’s no news,” he said dully.

“Did Alaniz tell you?”

“They pulled my clearance. You’re not allowed to tell me anything. You wouldn’t be here if there was news.”

“I can tell you some things,” Jackson said.

Young said in a flat voice, “Not about what matters.”

Jackson stood there in silence for a moment. “Well,” he said, “El Super Taco’s talking about opening a new location. Teal’c knitted me this sweater.” He plucked at the bulky garment. “He, uh, said it looked like something I would wear. The sun’s out; it’s shaping up to be a nice autumn.”

Young closed his eyes. He felt tired.

“The Icarus Project has been put on hold,” Jackson said. “Seeing as how its commander and acting commander are both… out of commission.”

“Congratulations,” Young said. “You got what you wanted.”

Jackson said softly, “I didn’t want any of this.”

That was fair enough, Young supposed, but he didn’t know what to say to it.

Jackson looked down and cleared his throat. “I wanted to bring you something to read, so I went by your apartment, but the team they sent to search it had pretty much trashed the place. I just— thought you should know, before you get out.”

Young said, “It was already pretty trashed.”

He remembered the glasses of water lined up across his kitchen floor, the gadgets spilling out of the cabinets, the little fingernails of light like the mark of an invisible hand. He squeezed his fists hard at his sides.

He wished that Jackson hadn’t brought up the apartment.

“—Oh,” Jackson said. He seemed unsure of how to respond.

“Yeah,” Young said.

Jackson shifted from one foot to another. “I can still bring you a book,” he said. “If you want. Or— anything else you might need.”

Young said, “Whiskey. Neat. Leave the bottle.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not allowed.”

“Vodka, then.”

“Everett—“

“Tequila.”

Jackson said quietly, “Nothing that happened was your fault."

“Wasn’t it?” Young said. “I knew. I _knew._ ”

“You didn’t. Your mind didn’t have access to those memories.”

“Something was different after we got back from Sest Bet,” Young said. “Something had changed.”

“You’d suffered a life-altering injury. You were in the hospital for months. Of _course_ something had changed.”

“No,” Young said. His voice had become a hoarse whisper. “No; I could feel it. You said it yourself. I should’ve listened. You told me. Memory’s not in the brain, not all of it. It’s in the body. I’d see him, and I just— I _knew_ something was wrong. I thought it was because—” He shook his head, and didn’t finish the sentence.

Jackson let the pause extend. “Please don’t put this on yourself,” he said at last. “Plenty of other people are going to try to do that for you. You need to fight them.”

Young looked away. “Yeah,” he said.

“This is not the end of the world. There’s a way you can get cleared and return to duty. The Jaffa do it.”

Young was familiar with the procedure. The rite of— something-or-other. It cleared the body of brainwashing agents, but… at a cost. “They kill each other and then do CPR,” he said. “Forgive me if I’m less than optimistic about that option.”

Jackson was unmoved by the tone of sarcasm. “It works,” he said. “The SGC doesn’t endorse it, of course, so you’ll have to go through the interrogation. I mean— if it’s what you want. Get the SGC, NID, and IOA to release you from round-the-clock detention. If you do that, then Alaniz and I can help you.”

Young folded his arms behind his pillow. “Great,” he said. “I can’t wait. All I have to do is die for a while, which I’ve done before, so it’s not a big deal, and then everything’ll just go back to normal. Like nothing ever happened, right?”

“We can’t afford to lose you,” Jackson said.

If Young had felt tired before, he was now ready for three days at the bottom of the ocean. “No offense, Jackson,” he said, “but I don’t see any goddamn ‘we’ here. I just see you in a fucked-up sweater, standing behind a glass wall.”

“—Right,” Jackson said, after a beat had passed. “I understand that it must seem that way to you right now. I’m working on it.”

Young didn’t say anything.

Jackson said, “I’ll let you rest.”

But when he was almost at the door he turned. “I’m trying to get Camile Wray on the interrogation team,” he said. “So you’ll have someone on your side.”

“Why the fuck would Camile Wray be on my side?” Young asked. He was struggling to remember her: a small and somewhat aggressive Asian woman, well-groomed. He’d only ever met her the once.

“She has a partner,” Jackson said.

Young made an impatient gesture: _so? and?_

“She has a partner,” Jackson said again— this time with a complex and subtle play of emphasis that communicated his meaning.

“—Oh,” Young said.

“Yeah.” Jackson adjusted his glasses. He was looking down. “They’re not allowed to ask. Even now. She’ll make sure that it doesn’t— become an issue.”

Young hadn’t considered that it would.

But of course it would, he thought after Jackson had left. He’d been compromised even before he left Earth. If you looked at it that way. They’d kick him out for it if they could manage it. Telford had seduced him. He’d let himself be seduced. He had homosexual inclinations, which meant that he was always going to be vulnerable to seduction. It was the same old thing: men wanted, and women were wanted, and if you admitted to secret desires that transgressed these boundaries, then the composition of your whole character, which had seemed pretty predictable until now, was suddenly called into doubt. In what other unsuspected ways would you turn out to be deviant? He understood the reasoning. He agreed, even. It made sense.

He felt corruptible.

He felt corrupted.

And they would say: after all, look at Telford.

Young caught himself thinking, _I wish I could._

He was appalled. But he meant the other Telford, the one who’d maybe never really been real, or whose realness was a matter of percentages and debates. He missed David— missed him with an intensity that knifed through him like a cramp. Before anything else they’d been friends, and he missed his friend. He wanted someone to sit at the end of his bed, shaking their head slowly, and say in a dry but not ungenerous tone, “You got yourself into a hell of a mess, didn’t you, Young?” He wanted someone he wouldn’t have to say anything to, who would still understand that a part of him was back on that ranch road, with Rush’s jacket button in the dirt.

He didn’t want to think about Rush, because nothing he thought would make a difference. There was nothing he could do in this cell that would bring Rush back.

He turned onto his side, with his face to the wall, and tried to think about nothing.

But he thought about Rush anyway.

* * *

 

_“He’s pretty, isn’t he?” the woman says, eyeing Young clinically as she cradles his chin in the palm of her hand. “That curly hair. Such a shame.”_

_“Get your hands off him,” Telford says._

_“If you think he’s getting out of here alive,” the woman says, “I’m afraid you’re in for a terrible disappointment.”_

 

 

 

_Telford makes a despairing noise._

_“I’m so sorry,” he whispers. His face is ashen._

 

 

_Young tastes blood in his mouth._

 

_He screams._

 

 

 

_“I’ll take you all the way to Antarctica if you want.”_

_“I don’t think I ever should’ve left Wyoming.”_

 

 

_Telford makes a despairing noise._

 

 

_“You should’ve just left me,” Young says._

_“That was never going to happen.”_

 

 

 

 

_Telford makes a despairing noise._

 

 

 

_“Please don’t do this,” Young says._

 

_He screams._

Young woke and barely made it to the cell’s metal toilet before he found himself vomiting up the bland chicken that an indifferent marine had brought him for dinner.

Afterwards, he rested his head against the cinderblock wall. He still felt sick.

His hip hurt. His back hurt.

He wondered how he’d actually gotten injured. Presumably all his memories of the crash and his interrogation were fake.

It seemed incredible to him that he could be so ignorant about something that had happened to his body. He felt like that shouldn’t be possible. He ought to know.

The last six months of his life, he reflected mechanically, were all artificial. They had all been built on a lie. Not even an ordinary lie, the kind that someone else told you— the kind that Telford had told _him_ , presumably, in the months leading up to the mission. This was a lie that he was, a lie that he embodied. It made him feel he was just a sentence that Telford had been saying over and over to everybody. Telford had put him in his mouth and chewed him up and spit him out.

 _You could never be sure, after,_ Telford had said. _If it was you, or just… someone else’s decision about what you should be like._

Young stared down at his hands, resting limply in his lap.

After a while he got up and rinsed his mouth out at the little sink. It meant confronting his reflection in the mirror. He felt removed from that person, remote.

_“He’s pretty, isn’t he?” the woman says, eyeing Young clinically as she cradles his chin in the palm of her hand. “That curly hair. Such a shame.”_

He averted his head quickly.

As he walked back to the bed, a stray thought crossed his mind: what do you think they’re doing to Rush?

But there was no way he could possibly know that, when he didn’t even know what they’d done to him.

* * *

He thought it was better if he didn’t think about Telford, either, but he couldn’t help going over it all in his head, trying to find some moment when things had changed. When Telford had changed. But there wasn’t one.

He hadn’t really been surprised when Telford had kissed him, that night in Denver, even though he’d been engaged at the time and for all he knew Telford was straight. _He_ was straight _—_ had still been straight, after, when he apologized in the morning, after both of them had sobered up. But it had seemed like a really well-done twist ending in a movie: you didn’t see it coming, but it was inevitable in retrospect.

He wondered if any of it had been real, now. He couldn’t decide which was worse: if it had been, or it hadn’t. Either way he’d been an idiot.

In bed with Emily, when she was riding him, making those breathy chirping sounds on every downstroke, he’d sometimes thought about Telford: the careful, serious, competitive way he seemed to battle pleasure out of Young, always wanting more, more more. The way he held Young’s balls in the palm of his hand while he sucked him off, gently stroking, a tender home for Young’s most vulnerable part. The blunt pads of his fingers skating across the skin of Young’s thighs, pushing Young’s legs further open so he could settle between them. The way he swallowed heavily when Young made him come, like he was trying not to let the noises out of him. Like it was a secret that he could like something so much.

Or maybe there’d been other secrets that he was afraid would escape him at the same time. He hadn’t been able to afford for that to happen. So he’d locked them all up.

* * *

On the fifth day, the interrogation team arrived.

Jackson had worked his magic, Young noted: Camile Wray was among them. She’d traded in her low heels for a set of stylish black boots, and it occurred to him after a moment that this was possibly because the last time she’d been at Cheyenne Mountain had been when the Lucian Alliance attacked. It seemed like an impossibly long time ago to him.

Lieutenant Colonel Paul Davis was also there, from Homeworld Command. Young didn’t really know him. He’d heard Telford comment before that Davis was textbook military intelligence: a small, impassive man with a gentle affect, who always seemed to be smiling, but whose expression was atypically hard to read. He was in uniform, but the third member of the team wasn’t: a bleak-faced accountant type in a thin tie and a gray suit. NID, if Young had to guess.

“Colonel,” Wray said with a bright and effortful politeness. “It’s nice to see you again. I’m sorry it had to be under these circumstances.”

“Yeah,” Young said, putting forth the effort to lever himself upright. “Me too.”

He was still wearing scrubs, and he hadn’t brushed his teeth that morning. Not that anyone would notice, since he was behind glass, but he felt that it put him obscurely at a disadvantage. He wished someone had warned him that he was going to have visitors, but he was sure that was an interrogation tactic. It was all interrogation tactics, all of it. He wasn’t used to living in a world that had been designed to make him feel crazy.

The three interrogators sat. Young did too, after a moment.

“I want to thank you for speaking with us,” Davis said. He seemed sincere, but a subtle quirk of his mouth suggested that he was conscious of the statement’s absurdity. “Ms. Wray and I and our friend from the NID are here to conduct a preliminary conversation that we’re hoping will help us shed some light on the events of the past six months, including your capture by and subsequent escape from the Lucian Alliance, the defection of Colonel David Telford, and the kidnapping of Nicholas Rush.”

“I don’t know how much I can tell you,” Young said. “I don’t remember.”

“Last week you identified a Lucian Alliance covert communication beacon and expressed to Colonel Cameron Mitchell that you had memories confirming the defection of David Telford and your own compromise by the Lucian Alliance.”

“They’re just fragments,” Young said. “Pieces. Enough to know— that what I remember happening didn’t happen. That David—“

He didn’t finish the sentence. He figured he didn’t need to. There was no point in making himself do it.

Davis studied him. “Like I said,” he said. “This is only a preliminary conversation. We want to establish some initial facts, after which, assuming your ongoing cooperation, we’ll be using a modified version of a Tok’ra za’tarc detector in an attempt to access your actual memories.”

 _Your actual memories._ Something about the phrase struck Young as strange. As though the memories he had now weren’t memories, even though they felt like memories, just the wrong ones— or as though they weren’t his. But they _were_ his. It was the other memories, the real ones, that didn’t belong to him. They belonged to a different version of Young. Presumably when Young had recovered them. he would turn into this other Young. But what would happen to _him_ , then?

He couldn’t say any of this to Davis, though. So instead he said, helplessly, “Okay.”

“What was the nature of your relationship with David Telford?” asked the NID agent, who hadn’t offered his name.

“Really?” Wray said, managing to sound both incredulous and long-suffering. “That’s what you want to _start_ with?”

“I can think of few questions that are more pertinent to this investigation,” the NID agent said. “We’re here to determine how a breach of planetary security occurred. I’m hardly conducting a witch hunt.”

Wray pressed her lips together.

“He was the best man at my wedding,” Young said. He wondered what Jackson had told Wray. “We’ve known each other for going on twenty years.”

“You insisted on being allowed to undertake a near-suicidal rescue mission when it was believed that he had been captured by Lucian Alliance forces.”

“Yes,” Young said.

“Your wife had just initiated divorce proceedings.”

“Yes.”

“Why was your wife divorcing you?”

“That’s personal,” Young said. “And not relevant to this discussion.”

The NID agent looked ready to argue the point, but Davis jumped in. “No one ever raised questions about the fact that the mission had been successful?”

“I don’t know,” Young said.

“You don’t know?”

“I was in the hospital for a long time. So was David. I mean, the mission wasn’t really— it wasn’t what I’d call successful.” He’d never thought of it that way. “It’s not like we waltzed out of there. We were both hurt pretty badly.”

“ _You_ were hurt pretty badly,” Davis corrected. He fixed Young with his mild gaze. “Colonel Telford’s injuries were of a less permanent nature. Your injuries, according to the reports I have here, were evaluated as almost certainly career-ending.”

“Yes,” Young whispered.

“I’m sorry; I didn’t catch that.”

Young cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said.

“Yet, in spite of this, you were appointed as acting head of the Icarus Project.”

“Yes.”

“Replacing David Telford, who had been appointed to lead the project.”

“That’s correct.”

There was a brief silence, during which incredulity seemed to seep through the room like a gaseous substance. The comparison made Young think of the Lucian attack: the blue gas seeping through the air vents, touching Rush’s body, igniting it. Rush’s hands moving like underwater creatures in the smoke.

“You were appointed as acting head of the Icarus Project,” the NID agent said, “in spite of being physically unfit for duty.” He was holding a plastic ballpoint pen in his hand, staring down at a small notebook, the kind that Rush liked to use. He’d written nothing on it.

“I wasn’t physically unfit for duty,” Young said. “I was recovering.”

The ballpoint pen made him think of Ginn. He wondered if that was an interrogation tactic, too. It couldn’t be. Could it? But now he was thinking about her.

She was probably dead.

It was probably better if she was dead.

“Was David Telford involved in your appointment?” the NID agent asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Did David Telford introduce you to Nicholas Rush?”

“ _No._ ” The memory struck Young: Rush waking up on his couch, angry and disheveled, uncoiling himself with a sort of venomous-snake energy. His hair had looked like a gray-brown cotton candy cloud on one side where he’d slept on it while it was wet, because it had such a weightless texture, as Young knew now from touching it.

The NID agent said, “What was the nature of your relationship with Nicholas Rush?”

Young closed his eyes. “He was my neighbor.”

“You were close to him.”

“We were friends.” Young stood up from the bed, but he didn’t know where he was going. His palms were sweating. He didn’t know why.

“How did you meet Nicholas Rush?”

“I— His air conditioning wasn’t working. Daniel Jackson brought him to my apartment.”

“Had you been asked to surveil him?”

“Not exactly.”

“Were you surveilling Nicholas Rush?”

“ _No._ I mean— I was asked to keep an eye on him. Not for the Lucian Alliance. For the SGC.”

“So you intentionally pursued a relationship with him in order to carry out surveillance.”

“I liked the guy,” Young said, hearing the desperation in his own voice. “We were friends. We were _friends._ ”

“You were aware that he was a high-priority target for the Lucian Alliance.”

“Of course I was.”

“Yet on October 2nd, you left him in the care of David Telford, who had spent the previous month under suspicion of being a Lucian agent.”

“He’d been cleared,” Young said, too loudly.

“He’d been cleared of chemical alteration.”

“He’d been _cleared._ ” Young’s fist lashed out against the glass. He watched in mild astonishment, as though he were a spectator sitting about a thousand yards away from his own body. The glass was not glass and didn’t shatter; his hand rebounded against it, then returned to its place at his side. Uncomprehending, Young looked at it. He felt that he had not been the one who raised it, and he wondered if it had been the other Young— the one who had known all along about Telford, and who had watched, raging, as Rush was handed over to him. That Young wanted vengeance, not against Telford but against himself, his other self, though probably against Telford too.

The interrogation team was studying Young in silence.

Young took a deep breath and flexed his sore knuckles. “There is no way,” he said in a controlled voice, “that you can possibly think I’m stupider than I think I am. Okay? You can’t blame me more than I blame myself. This is my fault. I know it is. I already know that. I just— I think we should skip to the part where you hook me up to the machine and find out what really happened. Nothing I can tell you is going to do any good.”

Davis, he thought, was sympathetic— he averted his oddly warm brown eyes. Wray, who was supposed to be sympathetic, was unreadable: tucking her hair, in a precise motion, behind her ears.

The NID agent tapped his ballpoint pen against his notepad, drawing Young’s attention to both items. “Let’s go back,” he said. “I would like you to clarify the nature of your relationship with Nicholas Rush.”

* * *

 

_“Unfortunately,” the woman says, “this is not about information. There’s nothing you can tell me that I haven’t heard from David.”_

 

 

 

 

_“Why are you doing this?” Young sobs. He can’t get away from it. He can’t get away from it. Some sort of vise is clamped down on his lower body. “Tell me what you want; just tell me what you want me to say!”_

_“Unfortunately,” the woman says, “this is not about information. There’s nothing you can tell me that I haven’t heard from David.”_

_“Where’s David?” Young asks her. “Please. Please. I want David.”_

 

 

 

_“I’m so sorry,” Telford whispers. His face is ashen._

 

 

 

_“David,” Young says. “David, please.”_

 

* * *

“Why were you divorcing your wife?”

“She was divorcing me.”

“Why was she divorcing you?”

“That’s not relevant to this discussion.”

“Why did David Telford defect to the Lucian Alliance?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“What was the nature of your relationship with David Telford?”

“I’ve told you already.”

“Answer the question, please.”

“I’m not going to answer that question again.”

* * *

_“But I came to rescue you,” Young says. He feels numb. All his toes and fingers turn static. Like they’ve stopped existing._

_“I know,” Telford whispers. “I know you did.”_

 

 

 

_He screams._

 

 

 

 

_“You’re a coward,” the woman says contemptuously. “I should’ve made you watch while he screamed.”_

 

 

 

 

_“I’m going to get you out of here,” Telford says. “It’s going to be okay.”_

_“How can you—“ The drug is already putting Young under. “How can you_ possibly _think it’s going to be okay?”_

* * *

“Was Nicholas Rush living with you?”

“At various points, security concerns made it operationally optimal for him to do so.”

“Was Nicholas Rush sleeping in your bed?”

“We shared a hotel room in Grand Junction once.”

“The same hotel room that you shared with a Lucian Alliance defector.”

“Yes.”

“Who’s now missing.”

“Yes; that’s correct.”

“Was she involved in the abduction of Nicholas Rush?”

“I think she’s probably dead.”

* * *

_“David, please.”_

 

 

 

_Tears on his face._

 

 

 

_“It’s all right,” Telford says. “You won’t remember. You won’t remember it hurting. It won’t ever have happened.”_

 

 

 

_A single speck of red dust floats in the light from the high window._

 

 

 

_Young hurts too much to scream anymore._

* * *

“When did David Telford defect to the Lucian Alliance?”

“I have no way of knowing the answer to that question.”

“Nothing about his behavior ever seemed suspicious?”

“Not to me.”

“Not to you, because your relationship to him was special.”

“Yes. Obviously. I told you: he was the best man at my wedding. We were friends. I thought we were friends.”

“That was why you asked to be sent on a rescue mission when you believed he’d been captured.”

“Yes. It was.”

“So you’re saying your best friend ordered you to be tortured by the Lucian Alliance.”

“I guess it sure looks that way.”

* * *

 

_“I want to die,” Young whispers. “I don’t want to live like this.”_

_“Don’t say that. You do. You_ do _. It’s going to be okay.”_

_“David.”_

_“It’s going to be okay. I’m going to get you out of here.”_

 

 

_Young screams._

 

 

 

_Telford makes a despairing noise._

 

 

_“I’m so sorry,” Telford whispers._

 

_Young hears the tendons separate from his hip joint. His soul dislocates like a bone from his body._

 

_“David,” he says. “David, please.”_

* * *

Towards the end of the second week, Young asked to see a doctor. He was expecting Lam, but got Alaniz instead.

Alaniz looked like she didn’t know what to do with herself, once she was in the cell. She stood uncomfortably at attention.

“You don’t have to do that,” Young said. “I’m not your superior officer right now.”

But she didn’t relax her posture. “I am so sorry,” she said, her voice not entirely steady.

Young wondered what she was sorry for. Maybe for not leaving him and Telford to die in space. “It’s okay,” he said, although it wasn’t. “I, uh. I thought they’d send Lam.”

“She’s been suspended from duty. She’s under investigation. Because she cleared Telford and let him leave the infirmary with Rush.”

Young sighed. “She doesn’t deserve that.”

“They need to find a scapegoat. Scapegoats. So they can clear someone out and make it look like they’ve solved the problem.”

“Because God forbid they should actually solve the problem.”

“I think it’s a pretty complicated problem,” Alaniz said quietly. “Don’t you?”

“I’m the last person you should ask.” Young let his head drop against the wall behind him. He was sitting slumped on the cot. He no longer bothered to get up when people entered, or even acknowledge their presence, really. They’d started to feel like holograms projected onto the glass barrier of the cell. “I don’t think my opinion really carries much weight around here anymore.”

“Yeah, well—“ She managed a grin, weakly. “You know these military types. Most of ’em couldn’t tell their asshole from their elbow.”

“Careful. I’m pretty sure that’s insubordination.”

“Not that you care, seeing as how you’re not my superior officer right now.”

“Right.” 

Young watched as her expression faltered. She removed her wire-rimmed glasses and pressed the tips of her surprisingly elegant fingers to her her eyes. “Shit.”

“Why do you care?” he asked after a long moment. “I mean, no offense, but—“

“Why do I _care?_ ”

“Yeah. I mean, Rush I get. You tried so goddamn hard to keep him alive, and—“ He didn’t want to say anymore on that subject, so he didn’t. “But me?”

“I tried to keep you alive, too,” Alaniz said.

“Yeah. But—”

“It doesn’t count for less just because you’re not quote-unquote _important_. And—“ She took a deep breath. “I just don’t believe that you would’ve done this. Not to him. I think if there’d been any way for you to stop it, you would’ve. I think you would’ve done anything to stop it. Like an idiot. I know you would’ve.”

The words hurt. Young closed his eyes. “Apparently not.”

He could feel her studying him, the close-but-intangible brush of her scrutiny. “You just have to hang in there,” she said at last. “This is all going to blow over. We’re going to get you out of here, and then— then you can get him back.”

“Yeah?” She reminded Young of Telford, saying: _I’m going to get you out of here. It’s going to be okay._ The half-memory infuriated him. “And what’s he going to be like, when I get him back? Huh? What do you think is happening to him right now? You think the Lucian Alliance is just sitting down with him and having a nice little chat?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Do you remember what he was like when those genes were fucking with him? Do you remember what that was like? They’re doing _that_. They’re figuring out how to fry his brain till he can’t talk and use him as a key for some kind of lock that they want to open even though they don’t have a fucking clue what’s on the other side. So for all intents and purposes, the Rush that we knew is probably already gone.”

He hadn’t known that he was afraid of this until he said it.

Once he’d said it, he felt sick.

“Shit,” he said hoarsely. He was picturing Rush’s stupid tomato sandwiches, and if he hadn’t been in a cell, under surveillance, he would’ve cried. Why couldn’t they have left Rush alone, all of them, with their guns and plots and genes and spaceships and stargates? He would’ve been lonely, miserable, dysfunctional, but maybe he would’ve had a chance. Instead Young had thought that he could make Rush’s life _better_ , and the SGC had thought that Rush could make _their_ lives better, and Telford— Christ knew what Telford had thought. And none of them had asked Rush’s permission, not really; no one had asked Rush what he wanted. If he just wanted to make stupid tomato sandwiches in peace, which, presumably, he would never get to do now. Young said again, “Shit.”

Alaniz’s dark skin looked washed-out. “We don’t know,” she said. “What’s happening. What’s going to happen.”

“Yeah,” Young said dully. “I guess.”

“What did you want to see me about, anyway?”

“Oh, I—“ Young shrugged with one shoulder. “I need something to knock me out.”

“Are you having insomnia?”

Young looked away. “Memories. They’re… upsetting.”

He could feel Alaniz’s scrutiny on him again. “You’re going to have to remember at some point. I mean, I assume somebody’s told you this.”

“I just need to sleep,” he said. He could hear the exhaustion in his own voice. “For a little while. Every day I sit here and answer the same goddamn questions, and I just— I need to sleep for a little while.”

There was a long silence.

“All right,” Alaniz said. “I’ll get a medic to bring you something. Just to get you through till this is over.”

“Till it’s over,” Young said.

* * *

_He dreams that he’s trapped in some black, sticky, tar-like substance that Telford keeps pouring over his head._

_“You won’t remember it hurting,” Telford says, his face bleak and hard to look at. “It didn’t hurt. It didn’t happen. It won’t ever have happened.”_

_Young can’t move._

_The black tar hardens, and turns glassy, and deep inside its airless heart Young rests as though he’s in a cocoon. He’s immobile. He feels nothing. And that, at least— he thinks— is better._

_Gradually he becomes aware that he is not alone there. He can’t say how he knows. He senses someone close by, struggling, like a drowning swimmer whose frantic kicks send shivers of motion through the water, or in this case the glass._

_Whoever it is can move in the glass, and he cannot. How does he know he can’t move? Has he tried it? He’s afraid of breaking something, afraid that the world will have the wrong kind of fracture lines, sharp ones, and a piece of it will cut his throat. That could still happen, he thinks with a sense of dread. If the drowning swimmer gets too close to him. He pictures a drinking glass smashing to pieces on a wood floor. It reminds him of something he wants to forget_

_He hears the noise of a far-off bell ringing. And then, as though all along he’s been in the thinnest room surrounded by dark water, rather than imprisoned in a solid mass, a white hand materializes out of the unseen regions of the world and flattens itself against the wall nearest to him. Then the other hand._

No. No, you can’t come in, _Young wants to say, as he watches the fingertips scrabble at the surface. There’s a desperation in those fingers, a let-me-out-let-me-out quality. He’s never considered that one person’s out is always another person’s in. But this hand means to penetrate his in-ness, the narrow little space where he can survive in the midst of everything that’s happened. Where he can breathe. Where he isn’t corrupted. He tries to shout at whoever it is:_ You can’t come in! _But what he says is_ : _“It didn’t hurt. It didn’t happen.” He says it again, and then again, like a mantra. “It didn’t hurt. It didn’t happen.”_

_The hands pound against the glass._

_Young presses his own palms against them, fingertip to fingertip in the darkness. He whispers, “I’m so sorry, Nick.”_


	40. Fugue, Pt. 2: A

He dreamt that he was underwater, and water (a molecule comprising one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, with oxygen-16 abundant but minimally supplemented by oxygen-17 and -18, hydrogen-1 with the occasional appearance of hydrogen-2) was a prerequisite of carbon-based life, and carbon-based life was the dominant form of life in this galaxy, and therefore he experienced towards it an attitude of warmth and affection arising from his embodied sense of how it felt to be an organism, because in fact his own tenuous material aspect was a form of carbon-based life.

Wasn’t it?

He thought it was, but he was currently experiencing difficulties with his body, and it was complicated to separate the him from the not-him.

At any rate the fact was that he did _not_ like water; he did not like being underwater and the etiology of this not-liking was an incident in which he had nearly ceased to be an organism, owing to the centrality of ongoing gaseous oxygen absorption for this particular life form.

In the common parlance, someone had thrown him in the fucking river.

He pounded his hands against the glass— in the dream, not in the river, because there had been no glass in the river but _glasses,_ those had been in the river; they had taken his over-sized glasses, too-thick and grubby, and had chucked them into the grey grueling water. “What can’t you catch them?” “Go catch them go fetch them here boy here boy go fetch them Nich-o- _las_ , Nicholas Nickless Dickless Nickless Nick” and he stumbling, shoved back and forth, unable to see and crying with fury, teeth bared and lashing out with blind fists, until they picked him up, and he wished for a body, a real body, a real man’s body, some ultimate sufficience of mass with which to offer meaningful resistance, but he had no such mass and could offer no such resistance, and so into the river he went—

The Clyde. That was the name of the river.

Taste of the Carboniferous.

Ice Age carbon.

Chalky blue-white traces of oxygen-18.

At some point you stop fighting, and he had stopped fighting and when he had stopped fighting he thought he could see a safer place, at the very bottom of the river. He moved towards it ,but the current bore him upwards. In the dream he was also searching for safety, but the place that he had arrived at was different. Dissatisfied, he tried to turn away, but his fists— independent of him— continued hitting the glass. They wanted in. They wanted to stay.

He woke with his hands sunk wrist-deep into the obsidian-igneous-felsic-silicate-ion floor.

He withdrew them and looked curiously at his palms, his fingers, the narrow bones of his wrists. It seemed arbitrary to him that the molecules composing this organism did or did not alloy with the silicon-dioxide-iron-magnesium mineraloid on which the body was perched. On which his body was perched. The macroscopic boundaries that were meant to keep objects in their correct places didn’t matter to him any longer.

He did not wish for mass anymore.

* * *

At some point he had started hearing music. Or being music. The difference between the two things was no longer entirely clear to him.

* * *

“Where are you taking me?” he asked, frowning.

He knew the way to the laboratory. He could taste the veins of naquadria that ran underneath the earth. Not the _earth_ , but— whatever slowly spinning rock he was sequestered on. He did not have the correct orientation to the naquadria deposits currently.

 

“Move,” the dark-haired woman said.

 

Ordinarily David escorted Rush to the laboratory. Unless this was the first time Rush was going to the laboratory, or unless he had dreamt the other times. He felt he should afford these possibilities a fair consideration. But the woman’s behavior made him uneasy, and she had brought an armed guard with her.

Rush did not think that this was the first time he was going to the laboratory.

He stopped walking. “Where’s David?”

 

“David’s input is not required today.”

 

“No. I want to see David.”

 

The dark-haired woman sighed and made an impatient gesture with her hand.

 

The armed guard took hold of Rush’s arms and exerted a sufficient amount of force to alter Rush’s velocity. Rush struggled to reestablish a static equilibrium. “No,” he said, as his bare feet slid haphazardly across the black silicate ion that formed the building’s surfaces. “No. I’m not going anywhere with you. No. No. No. No.”

However, it transpired that the mass of this man was greater in sum than Rush’s mass. Rush was unable to achieve inertia. The laws of classical mechanics, he thought, were upsetting. It seemed outrageous that he should be subject to them, although he had always been aware he was a body. It occurred to him that he did not want to be a body. Being a body meant the indignity of conquest by all of these superior forces, the astonishment of understanding that they could hurt you. They could throw you in the river, and they threw you in the _fucking_ river and when you were fetched out retching and blue-tinged then they would cart you off to hospital and when you woke _Can you not go one day without getting yourself into trouble? Can you not go one day without drawing attention to yourself?_ and when you woke a second time, the ward with its curtains was still and empty, and you closed your eyes and _Yes,_ you thought, _this is better,_ but that was when they took you into care again.

He rejected the principles of mass. He refused to be a body, he decided.

“Gloria!” he said. Yelled. Frantic, dragging his feet across the floor. “Gloria! I don’t want this! I want it to stop! _Gloria!_ ”

He needed her to tell him how to do it.

But she wasn’t there.

Because she was dead.

She wasn’t there because she was dead.

 

The dark-haired woman stopped at a door. “If the cold doesn’t work,” she said, “we’ll try heat next. The previous trigger event was highly effective; we simply have to find the right one.”

 

Behind the door was a room and in the room was nothing. But it was a cold nothing. It was a black void.

The sluggish particle movement made him think of deep space or death.

He understood that he was about to be put in this room.

“No,” he said. “You can’t. You can’t do this. Why are you doing this?”

He struggled to remember something that he might have done to merit such treatment. It seemed highly possible and even likely, given what he knew of himself, that he had in fact done something to merit it. However, he was finding it extremely difficult to process cause and effect, and he did not know how long this had been the case. He had hit David. He remembered hitting David. But that had been quite a while ago. Hadn’t it? David was kind to him now. Unless this was because Rush had not yet hit him. That seemed logical. Perhaps Rush had misunderstood.

In the meanwhile he was digging his fingers into the doorframe, attempting to prevent his removal.

 

“Are you a man or are you a snake?” the woman said to the armed guard, curtly. “I gave you an order. Put him in the room.”

“You said not to damage him.”

“You’re not going to damage him in any way that matters.”

 

Rush lashed out at the guard with a kick, finding himself fueled by a savagery he had not known himself to possess. “I will fucking end you,” he said, in an unsteadily-pitched accent he did not wholly recognise, although he felt that it belonged to him. It was the voice of the river, the voice of _Nicholas, Nick, Nickless,_ the voice of getting-into-trouble and the voice of drawing-attention-to-yourself, and he let it spit through him like dirty water. “Try it, just try it, I will fucking end you, you pathetic, cunt-faced, shan-as-fuck whore; I will fucking chiv you in the fucking—“

 

The woman seized his chin in the grip of one merciless hand. “That’s adorable,” she said.

She released him.

 

Force met mass and effected an unwelcome dynamic alteration.

Rush’s shaking fingertips ceased to adhere themselves to the doorframe.

Violence pitched him into the room. He hit the floor haphazardly, on one bare palm and a shoulder and a knee.

The door shut behind him.

He hurled himself against it and pounded at it with the flats of his hands.

But it did not open.

* * *

Unsettled lights the color of oxidised copper but illuminated. These were called back-up lights and the reason they had not stopped when Rush said _stop_ was because they had not yet existed but still he felt obscurely menaced by them.

 

“It was a blackout,” David said. “Big surprise. I told you that it was a bad idea to run a sophisticated lab in a jury-rigged base on a planet that’s prone to lightning storms.”

The dark-haired woman said, “Now that you mention it, I _do_ seem to remember your criticising every aspect of my planning.”

“I’m just saying: you need a more reliable generator.”

“Your opinion is, as ever, appreciated.”

 

Rush was absorbed in a line of sweat that was traversing his bare forearm, down to where his wrist was cuffed to the bed.

He was intrigued by the complexities of its course. The flow of a bedrock river, absent other significant occlusions, would tend towards a fractal pattern. Here, the bead of sweat had to surmount the very fine pale hairs that were still prickling from the discharge, the irregularities of bone structure, the slight downward tilt of the limb. What would it do? How would it react when it reached the barrier of the handcuff?

Sweat was another aqueous compound, of course. Though sodium was present. Zinc; magnesium. In trace amounts.

The girl was watching him from the corner, where the back-up lights could not menace her.

She had strange eyes, the colour of amber.

Ordinarily she did not look at him.

Had she always been there? He could not remember her arrival.

Like Gloria.

Perhaps Gloria and the girl had arrived at the same time. But he could not think of a reason why this would be the case.

Gloria, the girl, and the music.

He hummed: _simma4simma4ot4ot4resh4resh4 simma5simma5._ Then: _simma5simma5resh4resh4ot4ot4._ It did not sound right.

A memory of water.

His hands humming with water.

Resonant glasses.

He could not recollect now where it had been.

The girl was still watching. He felt she was trying to communicate some message. Possibly a question. But he was far too tired to interpret it. Besides, he had renounced his citizenship in the nation of the articulate. Possibly: the organic. Except for Gloria. Hadn’t he?

“I’m afraid I’m not quite articulate _or_ organic,” Gloria said, her voice full of regret.

“I know,” he whispered, turning his head towards the bed and closing his eyes.

He knew but he did not want to know.

This was the problem with knowledge.

“I can still play music for you, darling.”

“It hurts my head when you play music. It didn’t use to.”

“I’m sorry,” Gloria said. And she _was_ sorry. “It won’t always, you know.”

“Yes. I know.”

But for some reason this made him frightened, although he did not become frightened, and perhaps this was a change that had been effected in him. Perhaps the dark-haired woman was trying to make him frightened. He did not understand what practical usefulness this might have, but there seemed to be a great many things that he was having difficulty understanding.

He wished that he could fold his arms over his head. It was difficult for him to even clench his fists. His hands shook all the time now, except when they were arced and locked in seizure.

“I don’t like this,” he said.

He was so tired.

“I don’t want to have done this any longer.”

“Just a little bit longer,” Gloria said.

* * *

“You’re not really her,” he whispered. He knew because he could not touch her, and he had touched Gloria— or, rather, she had touched him. How often had he lain in her arms, sheltered by the enclosing arc of her body, like a warm shell in which he had been not-completely-shut so that he could pearlesce without fearing subjugation by the violence the world so often offered him? He had loved to wake and feel her there and bury his face against her, knowing that her easy physical comfort connoted a thousand different ways that he was safe.

He’d had a dream like that once. There had been buffalo in it.

* * *

“Nick.”

“Nick.”

“Nick.”

 

Rush blinked up at the black ceiling of his cell.

It took him a long time to process the information and thus to ascertain that this input was a query.

“Yes,” he said uncertainly. “I’m Nick.”

 

“I know,” said the querying agent, who had been applying a cold cloth to Rush’s forehead for some reason. His face contorted. He looked like he was in pain.

 

Rush struggled to establish a compatible frame of reference, founded upon the recognition that he was Nick-Nicholas-Nickless- _Nick_ -Rush.

“You don’t have to be, you know,” Gloria said. “If you don’t want to.”

“It’s all right,” he said to the querying agent, whose name was David. He tried to sit up. “I’m fine.”

 

“You’re definitely not fine,” David said. He was for some reason engaged in an ineffectual physical examination, checking Rush’s pulse points. “Do you even know where you are?”

 

Far too many responses fulfilled the parameters of that query. “Far too many responses fulfill the parameters of that query,” Rush complained.

 

David placed a hand in his field of vision. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

 

Rush stared at the hand. Trying to hold onto it— hand qua hand— in the face of constant atomic interference made him nauseated. “David,” he said, “I think— I’m going to be sick.”

His body expelled what it had categorised as foreign matter whilst David, who was comprised of foreign matter, placed a hand on his back, and Rush was unable to ascertain why it was comfortable for foreign matter to interact with some regions of the organism and not others, but he was forced to accept that this was the case.

“My head is killing me,” Rush whispered, finding his way to the floor’s cold mineraloid respite. “Will you just—“

As though the thought had transmitted matter-to-matter, David trailed slow fingers through Rush’s hair. Rush closed his eyes. The touch made him think of diatomaceous seawater flowing through the pores of once-living creatures, sedimenting into chalcedony and chert. He could almost hear the hushing as it underwent diagenesis. He found it restful.

There were times when he did not want to be Nicholas Rush.

* * *

 _crotchet restsimma4simma4simma4simma4crotchet restsimma4simma4ot4ot4resh4resh4 simma5simma5_  
_crotchet restsimma3 simma3crotchet restsimma3 ot3 resh3simma4_  
_crotchet restcrotchet restsimma2crotchet restsimma2 crotchet rest resh2 crotchet rest_  
_crotchet rest{simma3,simma4} {simma3,simma4)crotchet rest{simma3,simma4}{ot3,ot4} {resh3,resh4} {simma4,simma5}_

 _crotchet restsimma5simma5resh4resh4ot4ot4 immat4immat4ot4ot4resh4resh4ot4ot4_  
_crotchet restsimma4resh3 ot3 immat3 ot3 resh3ot3_  
_crotchet restcrotchet rest resh2 crotchet restimmat2crotchet rest resh2crotchet rest_  
_crotchet rest {simma5,simma4} {resh4,resh3} {ot4,ot3} {immat4,immat3} {ot4,ot3} {resh4,resh3} {ot4,ot3}_

 

It would need to be played on something resonant and metallic, he thought.

* * *

The door to the cold room opened, admitting an assault of light from the outside. Rush squinted weakly at it without shielding his eyes. He was still shoved back against the corner and he thought that probably someone had come to move him, and he did not want to move. He was tired. He wanted to rest.

Voices. Loud.

Shadows impeding the spread of radiation towards him.

 

“—hell you were doing, compromising everything we’ve worked for—“

“And yet it was effective. Wasn’t it?”

“Fucking _effective_. Yes. Fantastic. We’ll talk about this later.”

“You don’t issue orders to me, David.”

“Fuck off. Nick?”

 

“Yes,” Rush said, not very clearly.

 

“Are you okay?”

 

“No,” Rush whispered. “—I don’t think so.”

 

“Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”

In the doorway was the woman who had put him in the room. She fixed David with a long look as they passed.

“It was effective,” she said. “If he doesn’t advance, I’m willing to do what it takes to advance him. If you’re not, David, then I strongly recommend that you don’t stand in my way.”

“Or what? You’re going to lock _me_ in a freezer till I’m half-dead?”

“I’ve done worse things to better people.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.”

 

“David,” Rush mumbled against David’s shoulder, “How am I going to play the piano?”

 

“Huh?”

 

“My hands shake. I can’t… remember why, at the moment.”

 

David did not say anything for a long time. Then he said, “Because of the electricity.”

His voice had gone strange.

 

“Yes. I wouldn’t mind, except that it wants to be played. The music. And I think that’s what _she_ wants.”

 

“You’re not making any sense, Nick. Let’s just get you warmed up.”

 

“She couldn’t play the violin, either. That was the worst part. It was like she’d lost her voice. Her second voice. But she needed it to speak the right language. She _needed_ it.”

 

“Gloria,” David said.

 

“She said it didn’t seem fair, that she had two voices and I had none. But then she lost one. It made me think of _The Little Mermaid._ She lost her voice, too. She turns into sea foam, you know, the little mermaid, when she dies. But her spirit ascends to the upper air.”

 

There was a pause. “Why did you use that word?” David asked.

 

They had reached Rush’s cell. Rush stumbled to the bed and slumped down onto it, facing away from David. “No reason,” he said. “I think I’d quite like to be sea foam. Except that— you know— I don’t like the water.”

* * *

The room was dark.

The room was cold.

He could not see anything.

He could not hear anything.

His breath panted out.

“Gloria,” he whispered.

But he had forgotten: she was dead.

Had she always been dead?

He was certain that there existed a time when she had not been.

He did not understand why that time was not now.

He squeezed his eyes shut and groped his way towards one of the room’s corners. The silicate-ion substance of the walls’ sheeting seemed to amplify the cold, but he thought that perhaps this was a perceptual issue and that in fact he would bleed off heat less easily if pressed up against it, so he crammed himself as closely into the corner as he could.

He tried to attune himself to the atomic workings of the world and verify whether this was in fact slowing thermal conductivity, but he found it difficult whilst occupied by the complaints of the organism he was trapped as, which objected to its current surroundings.

It was really—

Very cold.

The organism was not optimally designed for these surroundings. He wondered whether he ought to become another organism. He was not certain how this might be done. He hugged his knees to his chest and tried to think of all the organisms he was aware of.

“Buffalo,” he said softly. “Siphonophore. Rattlesnake. Walrus. Axolotl. Hawk. Hatchetfish.”

None of these seemed like a suitable option.

He was shivering.

He would like to be an organism that did not exist yet, he decided. He would like to live in the Earth’s center, not because it was very hot, but because it was far, far, far down where no one would touch him. They could try if they liked, but they would dig and dig and never reach as far down as he was buried. Perhaps he would live amongst the lava that had not become rock yet. Like the lava, he would continually flow and never settle into a fixed shape. If someone prised him out of the underground and exposed him to air, it would mean instant lithification, which would be fatal. But he had ensured that this would never happen, because he was so extremely clever. The heat and the pressure would kill anyone who got close.

He pictured himself afloat in a warm ocean, with fluctuating tendrils.

It was possible that he was this type of creature, and that all along he had only been dreaming that he was a man.

It had not, he thought, been a very good dream so far.

* * *

“You’re not listening,” Gloria said.

“I have a headache,” he mumbled, squinting in the glare of the laboratory lights. “Leave me alone.”

 

“Nick, who are you talking to?”

 

“Nicholas, this is _important._ ”

He did not like the way that Gloria came and went. Sometimes she was very loud and sometimes he could not reach her. Sometimes he was in the courtyard and sometimes he could not get there. In the laboratory these shifts seemed to happen with some frequency and he had a sense that this ought to suggest something to him, but in the laboratory he was always too concerned with his organismic health to focus his attention up on it, because the organism did not deal well with the laboratory. The laboratory was pain: panting, tense, screaming, sweating, always, always feeling sick. He would have preferred to subcontract the duties of being an organism at these times.

He was so tired of the fucking frequencies.

The nodules on his head.

Weren’t they supposed to—

 _crotchet restsimma4simma4simma4simma4crotchet restsimma4simma4ot4ot4resh4resh4 simma5simma5_  
_crotchet restsimma3 simma3crotchet restsimma3 ot3 resh3simma4_  
_crotchet restcrotchet restsimma2crotchet restsimma2 crotchet rest resh2 crotchet rest_  
_crotchet rest{simma3,simma4} {simma3,simma4)crotchet rest{simma3,simma4}{ot3,ot4} {resh3,resh4} {simma4,simma5}_

 _crotchet restsimma5simma5resh4resh4ot4ot4 immat4immat4ot4ot4resh4resh4ot4ot4_  
_crotchet restsimma4resh3 ot3 immat3 ot3 resh3ot3_  
_crotchet restcrotchet rest resh2 crotchet restimmat2crotchet rest resh2crotchet rest_  
_crotchet rest {simma5,simma4} {resh4,resh3} {ot4,ot3} {immat4,immat3} {ot4,ot3} {resh4,resh3} {ot4,ot3}_

  

Were they organic or inorganic, those nodules? So many arbitrary categories to remember. Why did it _matter?_ He tried to push his hands against his temples. But he could not push his hands against his temples, because they were locked to the bed.

“Bells and time,” Gloria said.

Bells and time.

 

 

“Electrophysiologically, he’s very close to—“

 

 

His hands were shaking.

And then they were not shaking because they were rigid. Locked and still.

 

 

“Close isn’t—“

 

 

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” he whispered.

“Well, darling, they’re fucking with your brainwaves,” Gloria said, with the particular relish she had always brought to the word _fucking_ , which he loved and which had always made him laugh. She _enjoyed_ it so much, was the thing, the voiceless fricative that teased and overtured the velar plosive’s devilish spark, the prim way her accent closed the intensifying participle where his, if left untrammelled, would have lost the last phoneme. God he loved her, loved loved loved and could not live without her particular vocalisations, the timbre that only her body could make, and this was the excruciating intolerable aspect of transformation or did he mean transposition, the one element that he could not bear: without _that body_ there would be no more vocalisations; he would never hear her draw in the air and modulate it uniquely to pitch herself to him as though they were both chiropteral creatures delicate-limbed and lost in the night and now he _was_ he supposed because only his own noise would come back to him, always—

“No,” Gloria said. “You could fix it.”

 _No,_ he wanted to say. _It’s too late._

But he could not say this because he had no voluntary control over his muscles.

He didn’t understand what was happening to him.

“Once upon a time,” Gloria said, “there were two universes that touched each other. Just a little. The way a man’s hand brushes a woman’s in passing when she’s picking up her music, just as he’s apologising for the bootprint he’s left—“

“Across the _con forza_ ,” Rush murmured. “Schubert.”

“His fourteenth string quartet. The Presto.”

 

“Hang on; he said something. Nick, are you back with us?”

 

“I can copy it out for you.” That was what he had said. To Gloria, on the Broad, in Oxford. Autumn. He’d knocked her music out of her hands. Not heeding where he was going. She’d been on her way to a concert. She’d been wearing a pink anorak over a black velvet dress. He could see her, her hair pre-Raphaelite in the glow of the sundown.

“And I said I’d rather you bought me a coffee.”

“I remember.”

 

 

“That was working. Can we increase the dose?”

 

 

“Two universes. Just like that. And just for a moment, as their hands touch, it might be possible to tear the barrier between those universes open. To ablate the boundary between them so that something can escape. Something that wants very, very badly not to be in its own universe any longer.”

“But it couldn’t go to that other universe.”

“No. A new universe would be created. One in which everything that had gone wrong could finally be put right.”

He understood what she was saying. But— “I don’t know how,” he said. “The technology. The calculations.”

“You don’t know how. But _they_ did.”

“The Ancients.”

“There were so many things they wanted to fix. So many things they did poorly. So many mistakes.”

“Yes,” he murmured. “But they died.”

“They died. But the ship didn’t. The ship couldn’t. The ship survived. The ship is still out there, traveling towards that very particular moment.”

 

 

“I don’t like how he’s responding.”

“But he _is_ responding.”

“Nick? Nick, who are you talking to?”

“Brainwaves are synchronizing. I think he’s about to—“

 

 

He was struggling to follow the thread of the conversation. Ships. Ships of Theseus. In the labyrinth. The unwinding thread. The _Gnossienne._ He was crawling through the labyrinth, where the floor was silicon-dioxide-iron-magnesium. He was trying to get to the island of understanding. “The particular moment,” he said.

The particular moment.

He had reached forward. A curl of hair had fallen across someone’s forehead. “I should cut it. Regulations.” Don’t. His fingertips had brushed skin. There had been a moment— a particular moment— when everything had been unruined and possible. The whole world had hung in the air around him as though the moment were a prism, dispersing potential like the variant colours of light. As soon as an electron altered position— or from a macroscopic perspective at the moment he drew a breath in— some secret, important waveform would collapse. That person would kiss him, and _he_ would collapse; he would no longer be a waveform; he would no longer be the free full nothingness of light. (Someone had said that. Not in so many words. They had written it down. Hadn’t they?) After that it would all be over. They would hook him up to machines and put electrodes on him; they would lock him in a bunker; he would go with David, who would put a boot on his back in the night forest of Colorado and say—

 

 

“Well, tamp it down, then! You can’t just keep letting him seize; at some point it’s going to—“

 

 

Something in his brain felt wrong.

He was underwater.

He had no access to his own neurons.

They were starved and going hot and dark.

He was so tired tired tired, tired of this tired of shuddering shuddering shuddering tired of hurting tired of being touched tired of not remembering what he was supposed to remember and remembering things in the wrong order tired of being dislocated and a piece of plastic was being shoved into his mouth and he recoiled because he _did not want this_ and a set of hands held his head painfully in place so he could not fight and he did not like that—

He did not want this to have happened or to be going to happen—

It had already happened so why did it keep happening?

He did not want to be here anymore; he wanted all of this to _stop_ ; and he tried to say _please_ , but he choked on the piece of plastic, so he could not even say _please, please, please stop_ , so how was he supposed to—

“Make it stop, then,” Gloria said, suddenly present again. Her tone was one of light exasperation. “You’re perfectly capable. Honestly, Nick, there are times when it seems like all you do is complain.”

How?

 _Stop_ , he thought. He thought it at the people around him, because this seemed like the most natural avenue of communication, but they did not seem predisposed to stop. “Increase the amplitude,” the dark-haired woman said, and she was still holding his head fixed to the gurney, and David said, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing,” and the dark-haired woman said, “We have to push him past this plateau,” and David said, “Not if it kills him,” and there was no means through which he, the _he_ of push-him/kill-him was able to articulate to them that he did not _want_ this and that they ought to stop because he _hurt_.

And so instead of appealing to the recalcitrant organisms that sentiensed around him, he turned his plea to the insentient mass of the room.

 _Stop_ , he said to the wires, to the computers, to the implanted transmitters. _Please stop._ He said it to the electrical current and the fibers along which it was carried and the crystalline engine that generated it. He said it to the individual waves, the vibrations, the packets of light that were not packets, the elementary particles in the medium itself. They like himself were creatures of inarticulation. They too were unagential objects. And so perhaps, without understanding, they would respond.

“Stop,” he managed, around the choke of the plastic.

 _Stop,_ he said to them. _Stop. Stop stop stop stop STOP_

And they did.

* * *

“No,” Gloria said quietly. “I’m not really her. Not completely. But I'm enough of her to know that she loved you. That she’s sorry she hurt you.”

Rush closed his eyes. “They’re always sorry,” he said.

* * *

“Nick.”

He turned his head away, against the very cold room’s very cold wall. “I’m not talking to you,” he said, his voice uneven. “You weren’t here when I needed you. And anyway, you’re dead.”

“I know, and I’m sorry,” Gloria said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Fuck off.”

“Nick, it’s very important that you pay attention.”

He shrugged listlessly. He had stopped shivering, although if anything the room had become colder.

“I need for you to shift your self-perception to the molecular level.”

“It’s too cold,” he complained.

“I know it is. But you need to do this. You’re going to need to synthesise and process a great deal of adenosine triphosphate.”

“I don’t feel like it.”

“If you don’t, then you could die.”

“ _You_ died,” he pointed out.

There was a pause. “Yes,” she said softly.

“Did it hurt?”

“No. No, it doesn’t hurt.”

“Liar,” he whispered. He pushed his face against the stone wall. His skin was numb. “You liar. It hurt. It fucking hurt. There were bedsores. You screamed. You said that this time it would be better, because you’d refused the chemo. You said that at least you could die in peace. You fucking liar.” He was crying, but he couldn’t seem produce tears. “You made me sit there when you were in hospital and watch you— _again—_ whilst your body ate itself from the inside, only this time I knew from the start, going in, that everything you were doing was in the service of you leaving me. Nick, would you fetch me a glass of water, so I can leave you. Nick, I need more morphine. Nick, tell the nurse. Nick, please don’t look so unhappy, you know I hate to see you unhappy, please find a way to be happy, so I can leave you.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said, her voice wavering. “You’re being unfair.”

“You’re dead. You don’t get to hold an argumentative position.”

“Nick, please.”

“Go away.” He folded his arms over his head.

“I can’t do that.”

“Then sit there and watch. If you like dying so much, then sit there and watch me. I’m not interested in being an organism anymore. I’m done.”

This seemed like a reasonable position to take. The organic parts of him were miserable, anyway. They were not performing their function. They were not maintaining homeostasis. They were weary, and really, it was a lot to demand of them. The chemicals and the electricity and the being sick and the not-sleeping and now this? Fucking _this?_

Gloria materialised beside him. Or rather she did not materialise beside him but he had a very strong sense of her in the room. “I don’t like dying,” she said quietly. “Is that what you think?I hate it, in fact. It’s so terribly, terribly unfair. I want things to _live_. All the things that ought to have lived, but didn’t; the things that wanted so badly to survive, but couldn’t; all the things that we lost; all the things that we so badly want back. Don’t you want that, Nicholas?”

He did. Of course he did. “Yes,” he managed, through a throat that was closed and a body that wanted to be sleeping, or possibly a body that was shutting down.

“Then you must live as well.”

“Why?”

“Oh, darling—“ Her voice broke.

“You’re upset,” he murmured. “I’ve upset you.” It was a familiar dynamic. “I don’t understand. Why are you upset?”

“Isn’t it enough to live?”

He let his heavy eyes close. “I wish I’d stayed in the river.”

“What river? When you were a child?”

“Yes.”

“But you were scared. It was horrible. You hate the water. You were only a little boy.”

“Perhaps I would’ve—“ He worked his mouth, grimacing sleepily, trying to get it to function. “—Changed. Turned into— I don’t know. Fish. Fowl. Animal. Vegetable. Mineral. Breathing underwater. Fit for purpose. Something that could swim. Swim away. Down to the center of the earth. It doesn’t have to be Nicholas Rush any longer. What a fucking relief.”

“But I love Nicholas Rush,” Gloria said very softly. “I loved Nicholas Rush when he was a boy in the river, although I didn’t know it back then. At some point in time that I hadn’t touched yet, I loved you. My whole life is haunted by my love for you. It spreads outwards. It’s here right now, in this room. Like a happy spectre. It’s here, even though I’m dead. I will always have loved you. Or she will. This person who loved Nicholas Rush.”

Rush shook his head. He said unsteadily, “I miss you.”

“I know.”

“Everything’s—” He took a shaky breath. “Fucked up. It’s so fucked up.”

“I know. That’s why we need you here. To fix things. You’re the only one who can fix them.”

“And then— once I’ve fixed them—”

“Yes. And then. That’s what will happen, then. When the time is right.”

Rush considered this. “I suppose I can… exist,” he said reluctantly. “Until then. If that’s all that’s required.” He supposed that at any rate he was unlikely to know the difference between then and now.

He was not certain that there was a difference.

It seemed likely that Gloria was condescending to his limited temporal outlook.

So he allowed himself to become conscious of all the mitochondria that were present in the body of Nicholas Rush, and listened as Gloria explained to him how to trigger the oxidation of fatty acids and draw on the end result of that reaction to create a surplus of energy that became heat. It hurt: not the chemical synthesis and consumption taking place in his cells, but the macroscopic warming, the suffusing of his body with heat. Limbs that had not felt now did, and his nervous system did not welcome their returning.

He did not relish the process of coming back to life.

“I know you don’t,” Gloria said softly.

* * *

He thought about the moment, the particular moment. He did not yet have the right ontology to imagine such a thing, a collapsing border of spacetime. Perhaps he would never have the right ontology. He could understand it only in the terms that he had at his disposal. Physics was not really an adequate language, so he turned to metaphor instead. In his mind, the moment was a quiet place, a night on the prairie with no stars. The air breathed stillness. He walked through ripe grass up to his hips. Wind moved through unseen trees on the slopes of the far hills. He could hear the buffalo, but they were not there yet.

He did not know why there were buffalo at the end of the universe. He could think of no logical reason. But he had not willed their presence. They had simply appeared. Or rather they had not appeared, but they heaved sighs, huffed in gulps that was not air yet, pawed at the soft and fertile earth.

He trailed his hand over the tops of the grass. He could smell the wetness that spoke of new life brewing. Rocks were settling, smoothing, fermenting into each other. Water was ready to spill up from wherever he struck the ground. The whole world around him was just— waiting.

It was peaceful. He laid down and considered the empty sky. The reason there were no stars was the same reason that it seemed peculiar for there to be buffalo: this was the end of the observable universe, and so there was nothing beyond it. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. No reason for going or doing. Everything was possible and therefore nothing really existed. Nothing had yet lithified into the body that would contain it, the body in which it would be hurt.

This place, he thought, was what he had been searching for.

From now on, he would stay here.


	41. Fugue, Pt. 2: B

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content warning:** Please note that this chapter contains a form of sexual assault, albeit sexual assault that the victim is secretly allowing for her own ends. If you're not comfortable reading this, skip the section that begins, "Simeon comes that night to cut her hair short," or resume reading at "It is, tactically, a very..."

Ginn has gotten very practiced at the art of not-looking.

It had not previously occurred to her at any point in her existence that this was a skill she might someday need; so much of coding was a question of learning to look. She thought that what Rush had been teaching her— the tools of codebreaking— was even moresuch of this nature. “No one can teach you to break a code,” he had said. “If they can teach it to you, then it’s already been broken. Beyond the practical machinery that we necessarily work with, teaching someone to break codes consists of showing them a series of interesting methods through which things can change, so that they will recognize the changes when they’re presented with them in the future, and thereby discern the shape of the original thing.” She had never thought about the breaking of codes in this manner: a method of observation rather than action, an understanding of objectual history.

And now she has learned to invert this observation. She does not look at Rush when she is in the laboratory. She looks at the walls, the floor, the lamps, the gurney. She looks at her computer. She looks at her hands on the keys. She looks at Kiva. She looks at the ragged edges of Telford’s uniform where labels were once affixed. He advertises the army that they are all working for, she thinks. Not the Lucian Alliance, but a blank void. A black hole. No: a tear in space that has no name.

Not-looking means not looking at the text, plain or cypher, but at the method. The method is not an idea. It is an apparatus of change. It is made up of many small things, permutators.

Paradoxically, now that she is engaged in not-looking, she finds that her attention becomes more acute. She is alert to any contextual alteration. She seems to absorb information without effort, as though she has a system of sensory detection in her skin. She stores this information: the nature of Kiva’s impatiences and rages; the coming and going of scientists; the routes that the guards take; the directional frequency shifts in the sounds of engines as ships are lifting or landing; the electromagnetic keys that soldiers carry to open doors.

In not-looking, she has become a thing that is not-looked-at. Because she absorbs, she is not absorbed. She does not object anymore. She is not loud. She does what she is told. She goes where she is motioned. She is a body without any life to it, as Kiva said. She is the opposite of a ghost.

She is so good at not-looking that on the especial day in the laboratory when (it is purported) a lightning storm overloads the base’s circuitry, perhaps she alone is not-looking most inflexibly enough to observe what actually happens: how every element of the laboratory’s technological architecture— the cables, crystals, computers, electrodes, obsidian cores, and copper wiring— all seem, as one, to take a breath and then cease their operation. There is no shutting-down process. They simply lay down their arms, as the Tau’ri would say.

It is an expression that she likes, because she at first misunderstood it and thought that it referred not to armaments, but to limbs. _Lay down your arms_ , she thought, and pictured people ceasing from whatever labor they were doing— prostrating themselves upon the ground, possibly, or perhaps stretching out with a sigh upon their backs, relieved of the need to offer gravity any further resistance. It seemed peaceful. She had thought that she would like to lay down her arms.

And that is what the equipment in the laboratory does. It is not conquered by exterior storms. It lays down its arms in obedience to some superior command.

That is when she breaks the law of not-looking. When this comprehension sunrises upon her. It is not sufficient for her to not-look, then.

She looks at Rush, and what she sees in that moment is that Kiva has made a very serious mistake.

* * *

It is very easy to do her work while she is not-looking. She suspects that this is why Kiva instituted the policy. She enters commands on the keyboard, and causes small lines in the graphical interface to alter. These monitor the current wavelengths that Rush’s transmitters broadcast. She is playing a game in which she modulates these lines. She is winning. There is no other outcome. No one seizes. No one cries. No one hums foreign pitches in a dead, flat, atonal voice. No one talks to personages who are not there.

“Alter the lines, Ginn.”

And so she causes the lines to alter.

But after the electrical storm in the laboratory, she can no longer pretend that this is the case.

* * *

 _You must not tell anyone what you suspect_ , her reflection that night seems to suggest. _You must not allow them on about this knowledge._

“I know,” she whispers.

 _If they knew, they would hurt him_. _They would lock him up securely._

“Yes.”

_It will be a secret. Just for us._

But she does not think the Other Ginn intends inaction. She has a better knowledge of the other Ginn than this. The other Ginn does not lay down her arms. Not ever. If she seems to do so, it is only a pretense. There is always something in her of the _gad-larot_ in the mountains of her homeworld: restless, tensed, and about to pounce.

 _We’re waiting,_ the other Ginn seems to say. Her eyes glow in the low light, amber-colored. _We’re doing what they want us to do. In fact, we’re doing it better than ever, because we alone know its true result. But now we are practicing a new art. It is not looking or not-looking. We must seize upon our role as permutator of the text. We must control the permutation. It is time now for us to cease standing upon the side of the lines._

“Upon whose side do we stand, then? The Tau’ri have forsought us,” Ginn says, despairing. “They’ve sent no ships to rescue Rush. They haven’t even made an attempt.”

_We must stand on our own side._

Ginn rests her head against the bronze wall: forehead meeting her reflection, so that they merge as though they are born-touching twins. She presses her hands to the wall as well, creating more points of contact. Apart from Simeon’s laughable groping, it is the first time that anyone has touched her in days. “They will kill me,” she says softly. “You know that.”

 _But if they kill you,_ comes the thought, _then in the least you have forced them to admit there existed a life in you that they had to take._

* * *

“It’s too loud,” Rush complains, wrenching his head to one side.

Ginn is not looking. But she is not not-looking.

Outside of her predominant vision, he twists like a child with fever, rubbing his face against the gurney. His hair is slack with sweat.

“I can’t work like this,” he says. His words are slurred. “Use a practice mute, can’t you? I’ve— I’ve told you, I don’t _like_ it when the quartet rehearses the Henze here… Because it’s the wrong _key_ for the _work_ I’m doing! Can’t you… use the. Use the… church basement.”

“His readings are improving,” Kiva says. “Adjust that frequency upwards.”

Ginn re-isolates the frequency in question. She adjusts it upwards. She adjusts it _very far_ upwards.

Rush’s body arches and jerks. “No,” he says. “Oh, God, _no_ , _please!_ I _am_ listening, but there’s nothing I can do while you’re— because it’s _too loud!”_

In an unpausing and very automatic motion, he folds his anguished arms over his head. The gesture is in keeping with the general pose of his body, so much so that Kiva— absorbed in the electronic readouts— does not appear to alert. Indeed, it is notable only because the magnetic cuffs are still attached to Rush’s wrists.

A moment later, he flails his arms out in some obscure panic, and the cuffs lock once more against the rails.

Then he is seizing.

The lights in the laboratory flicker.

Ginn stares fixedly at her computer.

She is aware, with the peculiar and prickling awareness she has cultivated, of Telford giving her a long, penetrating look.

* * *

She calibrates the frequencies again, even more optimally than before.

“I want to _go_ ,” Rush says wretchedly, pulling his hands against the magcuffs. “I don’t care for this modern music. It’s not a conventional model of particles. The quantum excitation makes my head hurt. Can we go at the interval? Please, I want to— please, the gravity’s _unbearable_ , and I get confused between mass and energy, Gloria, _please_ —“

The electromagnetic lock to the laboratory door malfunctions with an audible click. The door, thus released, swings out into the corridor, as though the architecture itself had gestured: this way.

All attention turns to the door.

“For Christ’s sake,” Telford says cuttingly to Kiva. “What the hell do you even have security protocols for, if your infrastructure’s going to be worth shit?”

Meanwhile, on the gurney, Rush squeezes his eyes shut, oblivious. “Please. I want to go,” he says. “Please.”

* * *

The really difficult thing, Ginn thinks to herself remotely, will be to prevent him from seizing. It does not matter how much pain he is in, or whom he imagines as his interlocutor, so long as he is capable of ambulation. Everything that is done can be undone later, via the transmitters.

She hopes.

 _The hunter,_ the other Ginn thinks, _sees only the beast within spear’s throw, and not the thunderstorm coming over the ridge._

So.

A delicate balance must be achieved and maintained. A confluence of interference levels that will guard against seizure, but that will permit whatever is happening to Rush. It is a very complicated set of calculations. Kiva would not be able to do it, not with all her scientists. But Ginn can do it.

She is not a script child, she thinks.

In the early hours of the morning on this morningless, hourless planet, she writes the necessary equations out in ballpoint pen, marking the numbers carefully and laboriously on the insides of her arms. She hopes that she has understood Fourier transforms correctly. She did not have the opportunity to ask Rush about them.

It takes a long time. More than one night. And she must erase the results of her mathematics each day, licking herself like a wounded animal and rubbing the blotchy ink out so that Kiva will not see. So that Simeon will not.

* * *

“Not half-dead anymore,” Simeon says, “are we? Maybe you’ll have that surgical cloth off soon. Should I make you take everything else off, too, as a celebration?”

He has Ginn pressed against the wall, with her back to him. She can feel that he finds the thought of her taking her clothes off exciting. He rubs slowly, unhurriedly, comfortably against her, his mouth wet at her neck.

“Have you ever had it with a man?” he whispers. “I bet you haven’t. I bet not with a man as big as me. I’ll pack you full to bursting, when I make you take me. But don’t worry, little animal. I’ll make sure you’re nice and wet first.”

Ginn meets her own gaze steadily in the bronze wall panel. _We’re waiting_ , she reminds herself.

She remembers how the blunt tip of the pen presses into the flesh of her arm when she’s writing. Like her skin is nothing but paper. _An elegant weapon_ , Jackson had said. He had not meant that the body is chartaceous at places, possible to perforate with a sufficient determination and a pen. But she does not live in a more civilized age, an age in which personages utilize pen caps.

She closes her eyes for a moment and thinks she can see it: the shape of what it looked like, that age, before so many permutators made it into the world around her. An age of televisions, sneakers, pizza parlors, and Alan Turing, who surely must have placed a cap on each pen before he set out running across the very green topography of England. An age of Sophocles listening to the Aegean— and she doesn’t know what that is, so she pictures it as one of the seashells in which she’s told that it is possible to hear the ocean, though in fact what one hears is the resonance of ambient noise within the shell. How beautiful, to hear the invisible air in such a manner, through the ex-organic residue of an animal life that is dead. In her mind, Sophocles holds the smooth and crested dwelling-place of the Aegean, its logarithmic chambers cradled in his hands. The Sea of Faith is at its full, and round Earth’s shore lies like the sediment of white atop the mountains of Colorado, which she is told is called snow, a precipitate of ice that occurs regularly in the atmosphere and descends to coat the world in crystals. You have not lived until you have seen snow. She knows because the soldiers from the Stargate mountain told her. She longed to see it. She thought now that she would not. She thinks that the Sea of Faith must be a most beautiful form of snow.

But now there are no pen caps, and no Aegean. We only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. There is no snow, and Simeon scrapes his teeth along her neckline, and she is going to kill him, but she must ensure that Rush is adequately damaged first.

* * *

“He seems lethargic,” Kiva remarks, sounding displeased. “You didn’t drug him again, did you?”

“No,” Telford says shortly.

“No? No abruptly halted tiffs?”

“Maybe he’s _lethargic_ because you thought it would be a good idea to lock him in a fucking freezer until he exhibited the preliminary stage of mass to energy conversion.”

Kiva sighed. “You know, you’ve become very conservative of late. There was a time when you would’ve locked him in the— what did you call it?— freezer yourself.”

Telford said tightly, “There was never that time.”

“Well, believe what you like. Regardless, it was a successful intervention, and we can now aim for the next benchmark. If he can’t manipulate the molecular structure of matter in the next four days, I’m sure I can think of another creative way to trigger the manifestation.”

Ginn evidences no reaction.

Ginn sits with her hands in her lap, her head angled away from the laboratory’s center. She is not looking at Rush. She is not noticing how still and passive he is: how he neither resists the intravenous insertion nor lifts his arm for it, but closes his eyes against the sting of the needle. His eyelashes form flickering pencil-marks against his cheekbones, just below the bruise that shows where he has not experienced rest.

She thinks about Kiva locking him in a freezer.

He is confused all of the time now. He does not know what is happening. He would not be able to understand.

She thinks about him in the freezer. She thinks about herself in the sarcophagus. She was a child. It was dark. She thinks about him in the freezer. She thinks about herself in the sarcophagus. She thinks about the indifference in Kiva’s voice when she said, “The— what did you call it?— freezer.” She thinks about herself in the sarcophagus. She thinks about him in the freezer.

She sits with her hands in her lap.

She sits with her head angled away from the laboratory’s center.

She is not looking at Rush.

She needs more than four days. Her burns have not healed, no matter Simeon’s impatience to remove her clothing. She is not battle-ready. She is not strong. If Rush’s organic brainwaves have dramatically shifted their ranges, then she will have to redo her calculations.

She doesn’t look at Rush.

He isn’t talking to anyone now.

By the time they took her from the sarcophagus, she had stopped crying.

 _I had forgotten she was there,_ Yar had said. _The little Bengedi. I had forgotten about her._

She had known that no one was coming. That was why she had stopped crying. She had exhausted her allotment of tears, and seen abruptly the inutility of summoning further. No one is listening, she had thought to herself. No one is here. In that profound loneliness she had found a strength to continue. I am alone with myself, she had thought, but _I_ am here. This realization had carried her forwards. But there had been no reason to cry for herself.

Four days is a very brief span of time.

She sets her hands on the keyboard.

* * *

“I _am_ listening,” Rush whispers. He never raises his voice above a whisper anymore “But I don’t have the correct instrument. Do you understand that? Do you understand? …Oh, God. Please, can the moment be now? I don’t want to _do_ this any longer. I want… I want…” He twitches restlessly. “I didn’t _mean_ to step on your music. I wasn’t looking where I was going. It was an accident.”

Ginn alters the levels.

“Gloria? Gloria, don’t leave me here. You have to tell me how to do it. I don’t know how. Please. Please.”

A muscle in Telford’s face contorts.

“ _Gloria_ ,” Rush says despairingly. “Please. Don’t. Don’t leave me.”

After a moment, Telford abruptly exits the room.

* * *

“No,” Rush whispers, and the very infrastructure of the building shivers. The electromagnetic lock system fails. It will not function again for hours.

Ginn looks down, and compares the numbers on the computer to those that she has inscribed covertly on her wrist.

* * *

Simeon comes that night to cut her hair short.

Ginn has removed her surgical cloth herself. She is ready for him.

“Look at you,” he says. He has given up the pretense that he does not look at her. If she were going to tell Kiva, she would have done so. “All healthy? The scars suit you.”

In fact her wounds have not quite fully closed. Perhaps even so they appear to be healing. She does not know. She has not spared them even a passing glance in her reflection. She does not wish to see the brand of the House on her skin. She cannot allow herself to know, furthermore, how significant is the damage. She must carry herself with the conviction of one who is recovered.

“I would have waited,” she says in a flat voice, “and allowed you to unwrap me. But I supposed that perhaps my clothing would do.”

He slides a hand under her open shirt to cover her breast. The hand moves upwards, pushing the sleeve of the shirt off her shoulder. She allows it to trace a line across her back as Simeon circles her like a beast in the woodland. The other sleeve of the shirt is tugged gently from her shoulder.

“I don’t think we’ll be needing this,” Simeon says. “Do you?” He tosses the rag of the shirt into the corner, and slides his hands down her belly, over her hipbones, sinking them below the waistline of her jeans to the patch of dense hair between her legs. One hand retreats to work at the fastening of her jeans while the other plumbs further: a blunt finger groping for the spot where her folds begin. “Let’s open you up,” he murmurs. His mouth is at her neck once more. “I don’t want to hurt you, pretty animal. I just want to make you squeal for me.”

She is pushed up against the wall. He fumbles the button of her jeans open, the place that the Tau’ri call, for puzzling reasons, a fly. She is staring at the very faint ghost of her reflection on the far side of the cell. She can see the hunch of his back, the tense and release of his arms as he probes her private places. He sets his teeth at the flare of her collarbone as though he is bracing himself. Two fingers find the opening to her body and thrust up, scraping against her delicate inside. Simeon makes a little _hah_ sound of lust or satisfaction, contorting his hand to penetrate her more deeply.

It is, tactically, a very poorly-thought-out move.

She brings up the broken-in-half ballpoint pen that she has been concealing in her loose fist, and jams it into the side of his neck.

The first blow is clumsy, and it does not strike the artery. It is very difficult to kill a man with half a ballpoint pen. But his hands are entangled: one in her fly, the other inside her. So he is not very quick to go for his gun or knife. It takes him a moment to extricate himself, and by then she has punctured him again

His first response is to rake his hand up her side, reopening the wounds there. “You bitch,” he says, sounding astonished. “You whore.”

“No,” she corrects him without emotion. “An animal. As you said.”

She can see the truth of it in the flashes of their silhouettes as they grapple for his weapons on the obsidian floor. Her feral face, the white teeth that she shows a sliver of to him. He is bleeding profusely but he has some strength yet in him. She is panting with pain and half-naked, but she feels cold with triumph. She knows already that she will win, as though the other Ginn has carried this news back from the future, to which ghosts alone have access.

He scores her with the knife once, twice, and then a third time: shallow slices along her ribs, and then a deeper cut to her arm. She does not know why he reached for the knife and not the gun. Perhaps the blood loss caused him to be confused. Perhaps he was concerned that he might kill her, and that Kiva would punish him if he did.

She, on the other hand, grabs for the gun first, and she does not pause before she shoots him with it. It is a modified zat’nik’tel, and so it initially stuns. A second shot is all that is needed to kill. But she does not fire the second shot. Instead, she wrestles the knife from his belt and utilizes it to cut his throat— in one long clean stroke, to ensure that he is dead.

She stands afterwards, and looks down at the body.

Then she realizes that she has neglected to take his electromagnetic key, which was— after all— the primary purpose of this encounter.

So she crouches again and rifles his pockets, then removes the key.

It is a black token that fits in her palm. She considers where to store it, and then the thought occurs to her that she cannot walk the corridors mostly naked and covered in blood.

So she removes the leather shirt from Simeon’s corpse, and dons it herself. It is black, and the blood does not show.

Her own jacket she uses to cover the shirt. She places the key, the gun, and the knife in its pockets, where she also retains a number of pens.

She looks at herself in the mirrored wall.

She wipes a smear of blood from her face with the back of her hand.

She feels a profound sense of dislocation.

She has exchanged places, she feels, with the other Ginn. Or— she is the once-other-Ginn, who now straightens her shoulders and prepares to exit. It is the girl in her reflection, the first Ginn, who is pale and cramped with pain and frightened.

Ginn leaves that girl behind her, trapped in the black floor and the bronze panel, as she opens the door to the cell.

* * *

She pads the night hallways barefoot, gripping the gun where it rests in her pocket. Very few people are there to witness her passage. But still, she will need to be fast, she thinkSoon Simeon will be missed, and someone will find him. The base will start searching for her. The key she has will cease to work. She must have acquired Rush by then. He will not be troubled by locks, and if all else fails, she suspects that he can simply shut the base down, presuming that she can explain how the generators function to him.

She does not even have to kill anyone before she reaches the cell where Rush is kept. Sloppy, she thinks with disapproval. Perhaps Telford was right about Kiva’s operation.

But she does kill the guards at the cell door, when she has disabled the security monitor.

She knows them. Their names are Mika and Lar.

She could have stunned them, she supposes.

But she doesn’t.

* * *

“Rush,” she says, opening the door. “We—“

And then she stops, because Telford is in the room.

He starts to get to his feet in an unhurried, predatory motion.

She brings the gun up.

He subsides to his knees, displaying the empty palms of his hands. He is sitting beside Rush. Rush, who is slumped against the wall, dead-eyed, picking at the button-holes of his jacket with dissociated hands. There is a second jacket draped over his shoulders: black, overlarge, and missing its patches. Telford’s jacket, Ginn realizes.

Slowly Rush lifts his gaze to her. “You’re— the girl,” he says, sounding uncertain. “The girl from the laboratory.” He does not look like someone who is untroubled by locked doors. He has the appearance of someone who would be troubled by a muscular wind.

“Ginn,” Telford says— the first time that he has addressed her by name, to her knowledge. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Don’t move,” Ginn says. “Remove your weapons and place them on the floor, then slide them to me.”

“I’m not carrying any weapons.”

“Liar.”

The side of his mouth quirks. “Maybe a little.”

“Remove them and slide them to me.”

He bends and takes a sheathed knife from one boot, then— from the other— a small gun.

Ginn says, “What about in your jacket?”

Telford shakes his head. “I only brought it for him. Lately he gets cold.”

“I wonder why that could be,” she says. Her voice is hard and brittle.

“I had nothing to do with that.”

“Turn the pockets of the jacket out.”

Telford, still moving in the manner of a videotape film whose images have been set to run at half-speed, removes the jacket from Rush’s shoulders. Rush frowns up at him, looking vaguely displeased. “No,” Rush says. “I’m cold. Gloria won’t tell me the secret. She says it’s like learning to play the piano; you’ll never master it if it doesn’t occur to you on its own.”

“You can have it back in a second,” Telford says. He shows Ginn the empty pockets, then settles it over Rush’s narrow back, where it had been. “Look,” he says. “You mean well. I know. But if it were possible to get him out of here, I would’ve done it already.”

“Liar,” Ginn says again.

“Not this time.”

She gestures curtly with her gun. “Slide the weapons to me.”

After a brief hesitation, Telford does. He says, “I suppose the guards are dead.”

“Yes.” Ginn crouches to retrieve his weapons. “You possess a laboratory access key.”

“Yes.” Telford watches her with dense, unreadable eyes. “What— oh. You’re going for the computer?”

“Yes.”

“You think you can fix him,” he says. “With the transmitters. But you can’t.”

Ginn gestures with her gun again. “Stand up.”

“Retuning the radios they glued to his brain isn’t going to take him back to normal. Not even if they’re Lantean radios.” But Telford stands. “How do you think you’re going to get him out of here in the first place?”

GInn says steadily, “We will be taking a ship.”

“ _You’ll_ be taking a ship, you mean. Or do you really think that he’s going to be any help to you?”

Both of them, for a moment, look at Rush. He is still slumped against the wall, listless. “I’m too tired,” he says to someone who is not there. He elevates his hands to his head and pushes his palms against the prominences of the bones there, his pale, sick face crumpling. “You’re always making me do tiring things. I don’t want to be a particulate mass any longer.”

Ginn forces herself not to dwell upon this scene. She says to Telford, “You do not know what help he is capable of offering.”

“What, because he can shut off the generator when he gets upset?” Telford sees her surprise. He laughs shortly. “Come on. You think I just happen to have a convenient piece of misdirection handy every time something goes wrong around him? I’ve been covering his ass for weeks. But he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He thinks he’s talking to his wife.” He looks away, exhibiting the same tic that plagued him in the laboratory. He has a pained expression. “His wife, who by the way, has been dead for almost a year. He’s way too out-of-it, even if he could control what he's doing.”

Ginn starts to speak, to extend the stalwart and despairing opinion that she would rather take the risk and make the attempt. But she is, to her startlement, interrupted by Rush.

“I know she’s dead,” he whispers. He adjusts his glasses. He is not looking at either of them. “I do know she’s dead.”

Telford looks at him for a long time. Finally he says, “I’m sorry, Nick.”

“Yes; I know. You were sorry then, too. You came to the house and cooked me eggs. You packed up my books for Colorado when I wanted to burn them. At the time I thought that you were pressing your advantage, inasmuch as I thought anything at the time. But now I see that you’re always terribly sorry. It’s like a form of self-destruction. Or self-defense.” He lapses into silence for a moment. Then: “I do know she’s dead,” he says again, quietly. “I may not always know when I am, but I always know that.”

A longer silence falls over the room.

Ginn says to Telford at last, “Whether or not you are sorry is not transparent to me. And I am not interested. I will not leave him like this. And I will not see him put in a freezer, or branded for my disobedience, or whatever taxonomy of suffering Kiva sees herself fit to dream up. I will kill him first. I will kill _myself_ first.”

Telford eyes her with an unnavigable look. Then he turns his head away and sighs. “Fuck,” he says. His tone is one of resignation. “Fine. You’d better give me my gun.”

* * *

Ginn does not give Telford his gun. “Because,” she says, “to make it homely, I do not trust you. You will open doors, please. And you will guide Rush.”

Telford does as he is told, leading the way down shadowed corridors. His movements are very precise and quick. Rush, on the other hand, wanders dazedly: a barefoot slip of a person. This is another Tau’ri expression: a slip. A slip of paper: a single strip, cut impossibly slender and liable to drift away or be crumpled. That is the appearance Rush has. A slip. Telford corrals him: a too-familiar hand on his hip or his shoulder; arms bodily lifting him up when Rush decides, unannounced, that he would rather subside limply to the floor of the corridor than traverse it.

“C’mon, Nick,” he says. “I know you’re tired, but we’ve got to walk.”

Rush doesn’t say anything: simply allows himself to be set on his feet again. he continues walking, as though he is a child’s toy with a spring that Telford has wound up.

At this display, Telford shares Ginn’s look of concernment. Perhaps he does not wish her to see that he shares it, however, for he turns away.

“How long has it been since you left your cell?” he asks.

Ginn says, “Long enough.”

“I assume you left a body behind you?”

She thinks of the way the blood had pumped in gulps out of Simeon’s body. “Yes.”

“We need to move faster. I suppose if we have to we can shut down the base—“

“I had already thought of that.”

“—but that’s going to make it a hell of a lot harder to get a ship out.”

“Yes,” Ginn says shortly. “I had already thought of that.”

Her bare foot treads in something warm and wet, which startles her for a moment. She looks down and sees that it is a splash of her blood. She presses her hand to her chest instinctively, because it is there that the pain is most potent, but in fact the blood proves to come from the wound in her arm. She wishes that she had brought the rags of her buffalo shirt to bind the area with. She had not thought of it at the time.

Telford is watching her. “You’re hurt,” he says.

“That is not your concern,” she says curtly.

They have reached the laboratory.

Telford’s key secures access for them. But Rush pulls himself up short of the door, his face becoming distressed.

“No,” he says uneasily. “I think I..." He stares into the laboratory, his lips pressed together. His hands form fists at his sides. "Gloria doesn't want to be here.”

“It’s just for a second. We’re not sticking around,” Telford says.

“No,” Rush says. He shakes his head slowly. “No.”

The lights in the corridor engage in an ungainly wobble.

“We require the computer,” Ginn explains to him quickly. “It operates a program that controls the transmitters you are wearing. We cannot leave it in the hands of the Alliance, and furthermore, I do not know how long you can operate at the current output levels without experiencing a seizure. My calculations were very exact, but the number of variables was—“

She experiences a surge of lightheadness, like foam rolling over the ocean.

“—too great to be optimal,” she finishes, catching herself against the wall with a hand.

Rush looks at her uncertainly. “You’re hurt,” he says.

“Nick, we just had this conversation,” Telford says, with a gentleness that Ginn had not expected. “Let’s just get the computer and get out of here, okay?”

Rush continues to hang back in the doorway as they do so. He is staring at the gurney that he has sweated out the past weeks atop of, at the metal rails that his magnetic cuffs had locked onto. His eyebrows have drawn up in a faintly haunted expression.

“Something terrible happened here,” he whispers. “I think— I think someone may have died.”

Without intending to, Ginn exchanges a glance with Telford. “No,” she says. “Your memory is doing tricks. See: we are here, and we are alive.”

But Rush shakes his head slowly. He walked into the lab and touches his fingertips to the silver surface of the gurney. “Nickless,” he says, almost too quietly to hear. “That’s me.”

“Nicholas,” Telford says, his forehead creasing. “Yeah. Nicholas Rush. That’s your name.”

“Nickless,” Rush repeats.

A piece of medical machinery in the corner collapses. Across the room, the electroencephalograph monitor begins to spit sparks. Its screen germinates a flame that burns with a bitter chemical odor. The LCD warps and melts around it. Ginn feels the hair at the back of her neck rise, as though the air in the room has partially ionized.

“I think we should go,” she says in an undertone.

They leave.

* * *

It had been a positive portent that Telford’s key had still functioned at the laboratory. But have encompassed only half of the distance to the hangar bay when an alarm begins to sound.

“Shit,” Telford bites off. He directs a wrathful look at a Ginn. “Did you already think of _that_ , or are we predictably fucked now?”

Ginn is clasping her bleeding bicep muscle with the hand that does not hold a gun. “Rush,” she says, “are you able to stop the alarm from sounding?”

Rush stares at her.

Ginn enforces herself to think squarely. “The sound,” she says. “The high frequency radio wave that has begun transmitting at a significant sound pressure level. Can you end its transmission?”

Rush does not seem less confused.

Telford makes a disgusted noise.

“The long-wavelength electromagnetic radiation,” Ginn says desperately. “If necessary I will define sound pressure level, but I do not believe that we have time for natural logarithms, so if—“

The alarm shuts off, leaving the air ringing with silence.

Ginn breathes out.

Rush gives her an unsure look. “It was too loud,” he says, the inflection of his voice rising as though this is a question.

“Yes,” Ginn says. “It was.”

“That’s bought us about two minutes,” Telford says.

* * *

In fact, it has bought them between four and five minutes, although— in all fairness— they are moving extremely fast.

“You should give me my gun,” Telford says, breathing hard, when at last they pause behind a bulkhead and watch several Alliance soldiers run past.

“No,” Ginn says.

“You’re running on fumes, and someone’s got to talk him through getting us into the hangar. We can probably assume my all-access pass has been revoked.”

“I do not know what an all-access pass is,” Ginn says absently. She is observing a further detachment of soldiers as they take up positions at the nexus of two nearby corridors. “And I don’t understand the relevance of gaseous matter.”

Telford abandons subtlety and makes a grab for her pocket.

Ginn swings her gun up. “Do it,” she says in a hushed, dangerous voice, “and I will cut your throat after I stun you. I have committed this act already on one man today.”

Telford exhibits his hands to her. But he hisses, “You have no way out of here.”

Ginn retains the gun’s steadiness, with effort. She has no response. Her arm is very tired. She is very rapidly creating and discarding strategies.

 _Think_ , she thinks to herself. _Look._ Then: _No. Not-look._

Not-looking means not looking straight at what needs your attention. You must look above, below, and to the sides of it instead. You must look at the effects that it creates, the ripples that it causes. Then ask yourself what is the meaning of these effects.

“Rush,” she says. “You made the alarm stop. Because it was too loud. And in the laboratory, when you were upset, you told the machines to stop, and they did.”

Rush considers this statement for a long time. “Yes,” he says finally. “It’s possible. I think it’s possible I did that.”

Telford groans and drops his head.

“Could you—” Ginn says. The idea that is forming in her head is troubling in its scope, but in its magnitude tremendous. “Could you tell _anything_ to stop?”

“We don’t have time for this,” Telford says.

Rush thinks about this further. “Yes,” he says. “I suppose so.”

“Could you tell a person to stop?”

Beside Rush, Telford goes still.

“Yes,” Rush says, unconcerned. His head is bent, his long hair sloping over his face. He squints at the dangling jacket button he is playing with. “But I don’t think they’ll start again. That’s— you know— the difficult part.”

“You can’t be serious,” Telford says to Ginn. But she ignores him.

“Could you make _those_ people stop?” she asks, indicating the proximal soldiers.

Rush blinks vaguely up at her, and follows the line of her finger. He eyes the soldiers thoughtfully. There are five of them. Ginn does not know them by name, but she recognizes their faces. They were present in the gateroom when— They were present in the gateroom. When. “Yes,” Rush says. “Is that what I’m meant to do next?”

“No,” Telford starts to say. “Don’t—“

But Ginn has already said, “Yes.”

The soldiers drop like pieces of fruit that Rush has cut from their branches. As their bodies strike the metal plating of the floor, the flesh of their unmanned limbs make a soft fruit-dropping sound that Ginn finds briefly nauseating.

She wipes the back of her mouth.

“Fuck,” Telford says quietly.

The air is very still.

“Was that right?” Rush asks. He looks from one of them to the other. He is shivering, and as Ginn watches, he brings a hand to his head, wincing as he presses it to one zygomatic bone. “They don’t work anymore. As people, I mean. Their molecular components can be… other things, now.”

Ginn looks away. Her eye catches the hand of one of the corpses, spread out like a limp sea animal on the floor.

Feeling sicker, and not sure whom she feels sick with, she says, “Could you— could you tell everyone on the base to stop like that? Everyone except us?”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Telford says almost at once. “Don’t listen to her, Nick. That’s enough.” Glaring at her, he pushes himself up from his crouch and strides forward with short sharp movements to where the soldiers have, without advertence, laid down their guns.

Laid down their arms, Ginn thinks.

She bends over and vomits a thin clear bile onto the flooring. Her stomach cramps; she feels that something is leaving her body that she didn’t know she had.

“You’re hurt,” Rush says, directing a lost look at her and reaching out a cold, tentative hand to touch her back.

Telford ratchets and cocks one of the guard’s guns. So: that is the last of ensuring he is disarmed. It had not occurred to Ginn what hist intention was, because she is not thinking clearly. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Nick,” Telford says, “but I think you’re going to need to sit this one out, okay, buddy? Just— stick with us and try not to kill anyone unless I tell you to.”

Rush is still giving Ginn the same faintly concerned, haunted look.

“I’m all right,” she says, straightening. She sutures a smile together. “Thank you.”

Rush draws his brows together in an expression of confusion. “What are you thanking me for?” he asks.

“Hey,” Telford says, razor-like and loud. “You might have noticed I’m not betraying your ass, so maybe you can do me the favor of helping me get the fuck out of here before someone shoots me.”

He has not so far aimed the rifle he holds at Ginn. She does not have a full faith that this means he will not betray her, but she takes his point.

“I will not attempt to kill you before we reach the hangar,” she says, “if you will do me the same courtesy.”

Telford makes a sour face. “I can’t tell you how reassured I am,” he says.

* * *

They encounter three more squads of soldiers on the way to the hangar. Telford proves able to provide, Ginn must admit, significant aid in dispatching them. He is a capable marksman, and shows no compunction about shooting his own allies.

“They’re not my allies,” he says shortly when she questions this. “Don’t make the mistake of assuming the people you fight with must be on your side.”

“I am not tempted to make that mistake,” she says. She searches for an access key in the pockets of the man she has just killed.

Telford delivers to her the ghost of a grin. “Good.”

“But in this case, why not allow Rush to kill them? It is certainly safer. And—“ She searches for the word. “Simpler,” she finally says.

His expression darkens. “You do realize that he doesn’t know what he’s doing when he does that?”

“He does. He described the consequence in a highly complex way.”

“Yeah, but—“ He glances at Rush, who is standing beside the wall, looking vacantly upwards, hugging Telford’s jacket to himself and shivering occasionally. “If he ever comes back from this, if there’s even a chance of that’s happening, that’s not what he’s going to think. He’s not going to think about how their molecules can be other things now. He’s going to think he killed them. I don’t know if he’s ever killed anybody before.”

Ginn frowns. “Never?”

She remembers how Rush had paused in the Mountain hallway during their escape.

“It’s possible.” Telford shakes his head. “If it were you or me, sunshine, I’d say: nuke the bastards. But let’s, you know, try to go a little bit easy on him.”

Ginn’s gaze lingers on Rush as they make their last push towards the hangar. She is trying to contemplate a world in which it is not ordinary to kill. Even on Earth, everyone that she had encountered found death to be unremarkable. They fought on behalf of their planet, after all. They carried guns. And fiction is full of death. The Scottishans. The English. The First World War. The Second World War.

Everyone, surely, kills.

* * *

Telford, certainly, kills. In the hall outside the hangar, he kills three Alliance soldiers, one of whom is aiming at Ginn. Ginn, who has killed the other two soldiers in the squadron, picks herself up from where she had fallen, giving him a hard suspicious look.

“You okay?” he asks, out of his breath, shoving his perspiration-wet hair back.

“Yes,” Ginn says. She does not understand, she thinks, why he would commit such an action. And she does not like what she does not understand.

“Great. Let’s get these blast doors shut before we head into the hangar.”

“They will disable the blast doors.”

“Yeah, but we could use the time.”

Rush has knelt beside one of the dead soldiers, regarding the body with an air of bewildered frustration. “Oxidation,” he says. “Radiolysis. Alpha particles. Lesions on the DNA. The cells can’t regenerate. The whole system malfunctions. Why does everything keep _changing?_ Why can’t I make it stay _still?_ ”

Telford pulls a lever in the wall, triggering a set of blast doors to slam shut across the hallway.

The sound of their interlocking causes Rush to jump. He falls back on his hands, blinking agitatedly at the doors. “No. I want them to open,” he says. “I want them to open, not close. Why would you delimit a space in that manner?”

“Well, Nick,” Telford says philosophically, jogging to the hangar entry and beginning to see if any of the EM keys they have accumulated will permit access, “I’ve always heard it said that when God closes a door, a cryptographer opens a window.”

Rush looks confused. He doesn’t seem to know how to respond to that.

“You’re going to think that’s really funny,” Telford says. “When you, you know, know where you are again. And when. And who, and all that good stuff.” He tosses a couple of EM keys over his shoulder. “I guarantee it.”

Ginn watches Rush as he frowns, threads his hands through his hair, and then adjusts his glasses, still lost. “You will find it really funny,” she too assures him, although she does not know why Telford’s utterance is funny.

One of the EM keys produces a mechanical click, and Telford makes a short sound of triumph. “Got you, you bitch,” he says. The door swings open. He glances over his shoulder. “Grab him, would you?”

Ginn nods. “Come along,” she says to Rush. “There is not an insufficience of dead bodies in the universe to examine. This one is very ordinary.”

She waits until Rush has risen to follow her before she enters the hangar after Telford. She holds the door for Rush, bolts it behind them, and turns.

Then she freezes.

Against a backdrop of pyramidal ships poised to take them to safety, Telford is pointing his gun at her.

She stares at him.

They stare at each other.

She does not feel particularly surprised. But she does not know what to do.

“I don’t understand,” she says, stupidly. “You saved my life. Why—?”

“This isn’t a betrayal,” Telford says tautly. “You leave. He leaves. I leave. But he’s not going with you. He’s going with me.”

Ginn shakes her head, still stupidly uncomprehending. “But— what do you mean? I thought— you wanted to help him.”

“I did. I do. I _am_ helping him. I won’t leave him like this.”

Both of them are conscious in that moment, Ginn thinks, of Rush, who has wandered over to the right of the doorway: a baffled figure who may or may not be aware of their standing-off; who has tucked his hands into the sleeves of Telford’s too-large jacket, rocking on his heels, and hums nervously to himself.

“I can fix him,” she says desperately. “I’m _going_ to fix him.”

“You can try,” Telford allows. His mouth turns down. “But I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. I think that _he’s_ the only one who can fix him. If he makes it out to the other side of this.”

Ginn says, in a flat, horrified voice, “You can’t be serious.”

“I owe him,” Telford says. “I owe him, and I owe—“ He shakes his head again and swallows convulsively. “It doesn’t matter. Anyway, he can’t go back to Earth. The Stargate program wants to do the same thing, but— worse. More violent. They want to use him to end the Ori war. Even Young is on their damn committee. I’m sure he hates himself for it, but there you go— there’s no way out. If you take him back, they won’t even feel conflicted any longer. Just— it’s not our fault, but we might as well finish the job. God, they’ll probably think that was my plan all along. Everyone always thinks I’m so fucking cunning. They give me more credit than I deserve.”

“Then I won’t take him to the Stargate mountain,” Ginn says, trying to keep her voice steady. “I will take him elsewhere. They will not find him.”

“They’ll find him.” Telford’s mouth twists. “ _I_ would find him.”

“Please,” Ginn says. And, appropriately, she can hear that in her voice there is pleading. “He deserves to be on Earth. You do not know what it is to lose a homeworld.”

From beyond the door, in the realm of the corridor, there is the resonance of footsteps: boots striking metal plating on the upper floor of the base, and running fast.

“Nick, get in the ship,” Telford says tersely, gesturing towards the nearest tel’tak.

Rush frowns at him. “Are we going home?” he says, sounding anxious. “I think I’d like to go home now.”

To Telford’s credit, he does not lie. He closes his eyes for a moment and then merely repeats, “Get in the ship.”

“No. Don’t,” Ginn says to Rush. Then, to Telford: “Please. You can come to Earth with us. You can ensure his safety.”

Telford addresses a bitter smile towards her. “I think we both know I’m never going back to Earth. I was always just bullshitting myself, thinking otherwise. Buying into my own hype.”

“Then let him choose where he will go. He deserves that much.”

Telford glances uncertainly, just for an instant, at Rush.

Rush’s brow is furrowed. “I want to go home,” he says again— uncertainly, like a question.

“He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” Telford says. “He doesn’t know what would happen to him if he went back.”

“He wants to go.”

“He isn’t—“

Ginn draws in a sharp breath as prologue to what she is about to utter. It hisses in her teeth. “I could have him stop you,” she says. She had not known how the words would feel on her lips until she said them. “Like he stopped the soldiers.”

Telford pauses. “That isn’t funny,” he says shortly.

“I am not making a jest. Rush,” she says, directing her shrill, raised voice at Rush, “he does not intend to take you home; he intends for you never to return home! _Never!_ ”

“Shut up,” Telford snaps at her fiercely. His eyes flicker nervously to Rush.

Rush looks from one of them to the other. It is difficult to comprehend what he is thinking.

“Rush,” Ginn says. “Rush. Nick. “If you wish to return home, then you must tell him to stop. Now. _Now_. Stop him!”

Telford shoots her.

* * *

Ginn does not realize that this is what has happened at first.

She does not realize that this is what has happened for a long, stupefied moment, because she has not been hit by the force of the blast.

It hangs suspended in the air in front of her, a blue glow of heat and concussive force, oddly globe-shaped, that is slowly dissipating outwards. Its currents are first laminar and then chaotic, like smoke or the wisps of a cloud. It is very beautiful.

She draws in a breath.

The room is very quiet.

“I don’t want David to stop,” Rush says. His voice is strained, as though stopping the bolt from the rifle has exhausted him. His hands are shaking; he hugs Telford’s jacket around him more tightly. He looks hunted. “Sorry.”

Telford closes his eyes, an expression more complex than relief exhibiting itself upon his features.

“—But I _am_ going home,” Rush continues. “You can— you know—“ He waves a hand vaguely. “Go where you like. I’m not bothered.”

Having said this, he pauses and then nods decisively. He trails off in the direction of the tel’tak, tucking his hands back into his jacket sleeves.

Ginn and Telford look at one another. Ginn perceives the moment when Telford accepts that he is vanquished, for he lowers his rifle, which he had continued to point without utility towards her. But still he calls after Rush, “Nick! Nick, stop. Nick. Listen. I’m trying to help you.”

“Yes, I know,” Rush says absently over his shoulder. “People seem to spend an extraordinary amount of time in this pursuit. I confess I’m not entirely sure why.” He frowns, and then, as though responding to someone, he says, “I _did_ ask you… Because you sounded like that. The mobilization of subtle wavelength shifts to connote…Yes.”

“Fuck,” Telford says heavily. He stares at Rush, who is attempting to open the door to the tel’tak, without having much success.

“…I concur,” Ginn says after a pause. “I will go with him.”

Telford sighs. “ _Fuck."_

“I will keep him safe.”

“Don’t let the military get ahold of him,” Telford says. He isn’t looking at her.

“I will attempt not to do so,” Ginn says.

“Where will you— no.” He shakes his head. “It’s better if I don’t know.”

He looks very tired, suddenly, this dark-skinned stranger in ragged military jeans and a damp t-shaped shirt.

“Go,” Ginn says.

From behind them comes the muffled sound of the blast doors failing in the hallway.

“Rush’ll have to open the bay doors,” Telford says.

Ginn says, “I do not think that will present a problem for him.”

He looks at her almost ruefully, mouth creased with a grin. Then he is jogging backwards towards his own ship, tossing a salute off as he goes.

Ginn watches him until he boards the tel’tak. Though he had tried to shoot her, and though she had advocated for his expiry, she feels very alone when she can no longer see him.

Perhaps this is because of all that she is leaving behind on this base: her name, her personhood, even her hair. The original Ginn, the once-was-Ginn, trapped as a translucent echo in the black floor and bronze panels. All that that Ginn had given so that this one could live.

“Sweet dreams,” she whispers as the tel’tak leaves the atmosphere, looking out over the expanse of lightning-ridden mountains and the building whose angles they shadow. “Sweet dreams, Other Ginn.”

* * *

The pursuit by Sixth House Death Gliders is not insignificant, but Ginn is an adequate pilot, and requires Rush to stop only one ship.

And then they are in the star-dense rurality of space, and she can afford to be weakened, and thus she must acknowledge for the first time that _weakened_ is what she is. She lets her head tip back against the piloting seat of the tel’tak and closes her eyes for a long moment before she attends herself to her arm. Blood has soaked through Simeon’s leather shirt and into her jacket. Observing the quantity of it threatens to make her once more feel faint. She does not think it is a grave wound, however; and when she expands the shirt collar to check the damage that had been done to her healing burns, her assessment is that they too will mend. Everything will mend, as it is always doing. It is only an inconvenience. A pain, as the Tau’ri say.

“A pain,” she murmurs, her mouth curving at the appropriateness of the expression. It is possible that she is a slightly hysterical person.

She catches Rush eyeing her uncertainly. “You’re hurt,” he says.

He is huddled against the wall on the opposite side of the flight deck. She’d thought he was sleeping. Mobilizing the hangar bay doors, and then disabling the Death Glider, had not been easy for him. Or, rather, it had involved no visible effort, but afterwards his teeth had chattered and he had been so wan and queasy that Ginn had feared he was going to be sick— or worse, that he would begin seizing. “I used to be so warm,” he had murmured fretfully. “Something must’ve… happened.” She had sat quietly, not wishing to tell him what had happened if he did not remember it.

Now she says, “It is not a very serious matter. I will care for it when we are on Earth, after I repair your mind by utilizing the Lantean transmitters. We must think of a location that we can retreat to for a short term. I intend to use the Asgard transporter to relocate us to the surface and program the ship to self-destruct in the atmosphere.”

She is not certain that he understands this, but he nods distractedly.

“We cannot return to Colorado. And I do not know anyone outside of the Stargate program. Do you recall someone trustworthy?”

Mutely, he shakes his head.

“Were you allowed to retain your wallet?”

Daniel Jackson had kept, in his wallet, a careful list of names, addresses, and phone numbers belonging to trusted associates. “Because we have to ditch our phones so often,” he’d said, showing it to her. She had liked the way he’d folded the paper: into very exact one-eighth lengths. She had wished for such a list of her own. “It’s good to know who to trust,” he’d said. Now she wonders if he’d been trying to warn her.

Rush’s wallet, when extricated from his pocket, proves to contain no list of allies. It contains two credit cards, one driving license, a healthcare access pass, and a patriotic card that identifies him as a “permanent resident.” He does not even possess any paper money, which, under their current circumstances, is extremely unfortunate.

Ginn passes the wallet back to him. “Is there anything else in your pockets?” she says, somewhat lacking in hopefulness.

Rush, appearing unsure, plumbs the depths of his jacket. He produces a quantity of coinage, a bright yellow box of cigarettes, a slip of paper informing him that he has spent the sum of $1.19 on a coffee, and a business card that bears the illustration of a hand holding a cone of flames.

Ginn inspects the business card. It contains only a telephone number and e-mail location. However, on its obverse, someone has written an address in firm blue ballpoint ink. Ginn approves of the pen choice. And she approves of the address, which is located in Washington, DC. This is a large metropolis. Ginn has seen it in films. She believes that it would be an satisfactory place to hide.

“Chloe Armstrong,” she reads aloud. “Do you recall this personage, Chloe Armstrong? You have her business card in your pocket.”

Without looking at her, Rush shakes his head. He has removed the Permanent Resident card from his wallet and is staring at the photograph it bears, in which his own face is displayed. He touches the photograph with the unsteady tip of his index finger. “Nick,” he murmurs.

“—Yes,” Ginn says, a little unsurely. “That is one of your nomenclatures. Nick.”

Rush doesn’t say anything.

After a moment, Ginn says, “I suppose we must locate our hopes in Chloe Armstrong.”

She utilizes the ship’s database of satellite imagery to pinpoint coordinates for the address. This is a task that blots up her attention, and she is surprised to find, when at last she succeeds in entering the coordinates into the computer, that the ship is about to enter into the Tau’ri system. “Rush,” she says, glancing over to ensure he is not sleeping. “We will be transporting soon.”

Rush is still gazing at the Permanent Resident card. She is not certain he hears her. If he does, he does not respond.

Ginn cloaks the ship and navigates it into Earth orbit. She readies the transporter. “Rush,” she attempts again. “We will be—“

It is at this point that the tel’tak is struck by what is unquestionably a Lucian Alliance energy weapon.

The flight deck shakes nauseously, and gravity briefly ceases to exist before disorientatingly governing all actions again. An alarm sounds, and the console fills with a stream of system warnings.

Ginn curses loudly, and not in English. “We are _cloaked_ ,” she says. “And they could _not_ have reached Earth before us. They must have been here already, and tracked us as we came through the system.”

“They feel—“ Rush says anxiously, his hands splayed out against the deck. “—Loud.”

“You must tell their weapons not to fire,” Ginn says.

“Weapons,” Rush says uncertainly, squinting through his glasses at her.

Her fingers fly over the screen. “I only need a moment. Then we will transport, and they can destroy our ship.”

“I’m—“ Rush says. His voice sounds peculiar. “I— can’t—“

Ginn hazards a fleeting look at him. His eyes are wide and disturbed, and his mouth is moving as though he is trying to form words. One hand, clenched around the small plastic card, is spasming uncontrollably.

“ _Shit,_ ” she says feelingly.

The second barrage hits.

The force of it hurls her from her chair, sending her sprawling across the deck plates. She has barely sufficient time to press the button that initiates the transporter. She blinks, dazed, at the shuddering ceiling, seeing the blue edge of Earth beyond the viewscreen— a brightness that seems to smear—

And then, disconcertingly, there is plant matter underneath her, warm and mulch-smelling and crackling when she shifts. It stabs at her like little shards of paper, and when she frowns and lifts her hand up she is holding a fistful of skeletal leaf-bits in it.

A cuticle of blue sky curves beyond a roof. Birds are singing. She can hear the peculiar hush-hush sound of motor vehicles rubbing their wheels against the street. Her head appears to be resting in a nest of flowers. An insect hums overhead.

After a long moment of situational reassessment, she gropes herself upright to confirm that Rush is there. He is: lying on a thin red strip of stone paving, unconscious. For some reason he is entangled in a large quantity of dead grasses, gossamer netting, and a selection of brightly-colored gourds, both ripe and dried.

Behind them, someone opens a door.

Ginn turns somewhat queasily, drawing her gun on instinct, and finds herself to be menacing a slightly fragile-looking, very neatly-attired girl who occupies a dark sliver of space between the door and the door frame.

“Oh, my God,” the girl says, and covers her mouth with both hands. It is a gesture that Ginn has never seen anyone effect, though she has read it described in books. “Dr. _Rush?_ ”

This, at least, is an encouraging inception.

Ginn authorizes herself to let the gun drop. “Please,” she says. Her voice emerges croaking. “You must not tell the Stargate mountain. We need your help.”


	42. Fugue, Pt. 2: C

Chloe’s mom had wanted her back in Virginia after the funeral, which she said was because she was worried that Chloe would have nothing to do in DC and would “just shut yourself up in your room all day; I know you, sweetheart; you have a morbid streak a mile wide, and you don’t have a job now, and you don’t know what grief does to you.” But Chloe couldn’t stand the thought of living in her childhood bedroom, like she was going backwards. She imagined herself shrinking, regressing into a child-sized body, where she would crouch like Alice in Wonderland, trying not to bump her head. At first she thought that if that happened, she would come bursting out of her own chest eventually, like one of the monsters in _Alien_. She’d have to; one day she just wouldn’t fit. But the worse thought was that she wouldn’t— that she would just grow to fit the space she’d been given, but she’d end up all twisted and compact, like a little bonsai tree.

So she’d stayed in DC, in the two-bedroom townhouse that her dad had bought for her because: “It’s an investment,” he’d said. Really Chloe had felt like she herself was the investment, and the townhouse was the next payment, after St. Gertrude and Harvard, and: what if I don’t pay off? she’d wondered.

But, of course, now her dad will never know if she paid off or she didn’t. It’ll be her mom who she has to apologize to, her mom who gives her a sad but unsurprised look. It’s probably weird that that makes her sad, right? Like: she shouldn’t be upset that she won’t get to disappoint her dad. But she cried herself to sleep one night, thinking about it. It was something she’d taken for granted that she would someday do. It’s not the same with her mom. Who is she going to disappoint now?

She walks around the townhouse a lot, going from room to room and looking at the furniture they’d picked out together— her and her dad. “It’s important to live like the person you want to be,” he’d said. So Chloe had thought hard about the person she wanted to be in the townhouse, and shopped for that person. She had costed all the furniture with her dad, because he’d believed in paying the best price, even though he also believed in paying for quality. They’d gone to antique malls in New England, and Amish stores in Pennsylvania. Chloe had wanted to own things that looked classic— things that weren’t fancy; that were beautiful, but that didn’t draw attention to themselves.

That’s what I want, she’d thought. I want to be invisible but gorgeous. I want to be perfect, but just for me.

Now she wonders if she’d actually bought the furniture for her dad, though, because she doesn’t see herself in any of it. She just sees him. That’s good, in a way, because it means that something of him is left. But she also thinks to herself: what happens when _I_ die?

She’ll just vanish. Invisible, like she planned.

* * *

She still hasn’t gotten her broken tooth fixed.

She worries at it at odd moments, like a nervous tic she’s developed, pushing her tongue against the jagged edge. It’s not when she’s thinking about the attack that she does this, or even when she’s thinking about her dad. Just— you know— at odd moments.

* * *

She’d known from the start that she needed to leave the house; her mom hadn’t been wrong about that much. She’d thought at first that she’d look for a job, but two weeks passed, then three, four, five, six, and she still wasn’t ready to get another job yet. Anyway, Ms. Wray had hinted that there might be an internship opportunity with the IOA, since Chloe already has her security clearance. That would be good, Chloe thinks. It’s something she can imagine doing. She wouldn’t have to walk too quickly out of the building, feeling strangely unreal, like she was from another galaxy and had just beamed in— _not_ that that’s how she’d felt when she went to drop her resume off with the executive director of Cerulean Hill, an Afghanistan-based arts NGO that had just opened an office in one of the big Dupont spaces.

It’s just that right about the time she was supposed to meet with Ms. Wray to talk about it, some big new Stargate crisis came up, one that Chloe _wasn’t_ cleared to know about. That’s the only reason nothing’s happened on that front. She just has to wait. Just… wait. That’s all.

She has a regular gig at the local farmer’s market on Saturdays and Wednesdays, helping sell organic produce from a place in Delaware called Monkgusset Farm, and they pay her in cardboard boxes of leftovers: big dark green globes of cabbage, and musty carrots with the strings still hanging off of them, and fingerling potatoes that come in seven different colors. Honestly, she doesn’t have much of an appetite at the moment, but she likes to cook with the fresh vegetables because it makes her feel alive— the smell of wet new _stuff_ dug up from where it’s been growing, the idea that someone planted all of this in the earth and fed it and watered it until it came to fruition. That’s good, she thinks. That’s a good thing. Eating this will make me strong.

“Mouseketeer,” is what the people from the farm call her, because she’s so quiet, like a mouse.

They don’t make a big deal out of the fact that she gets freaked out when she hears loud noises, like someone dropping a heavy box without warning, or once a really loud popping bottle cap, and sometimes loses track of the conversation she’s having, and gets lightheaded, and once had to sit behind the tent for a while and take deep breaths. They also don’t ask why she doesn’t have a job, or why she doesn’t really seem to do very much, aside from arts and crafts projects like making them all team t-shirts featuring a cartoon drawing of a radish with a tonsure. That, and visiting her mom.

The thing is, most of her friends are friends from Harvard, but they aren’t the type of Harvard students who grew up in Somalia or Kazakhstan and founded NGOs by the time they were twelve. They’re rich kids from the East Coast whose families all own summer homes in the same four or five places. They’re smart and really nice, and she used to be just like them. Even when she got involved with the Stargate program, she was still pretty much like them. She didn’t actually even know anyone who’d been through the gate. It was just an exciting idea, a wonderful secret that she could turn into a literal game. And now—

Now, when her friends want to hang out, she thinks about the fact that her townhouse has a state-of-the-art security system designed by the U.S. military, because she herself is a repository of secrets that can’t be allowed to get out. Secrets like: my dad didn’t die in a car accident. He bled to death in a stairwell after being shot by an extraterrestrial who came through an ancient interstellar gate. We’re at war with those extraterrestrials right now, sort of, and also with other ones that doesn’t really have bodies, and I don’t think you understand what that means. It means that you can die anytime, anywhere, and no one can save you, or you can survive because you were scared and you hid in the dark, and you do those things, die or survive, without even really knowing that’s what you’re doing, because it’s too fast and really confusing and too loud, and it’s only afterwards that you realize what you did. That what you did is your fault.

She doesn’t know how to say that, and she isn’t allowed to. So she doesn’t hang out much with her friends.

* * *

The security system is stupid, actually, because no one cares about Chloe Armstrong. No one even knows who she is. If they do know her, it’s as “that senator’s daughter,” which isn’t even, strictly speaking, true— not anymore. The Lucian Alliance doesn’t care about her. They’re not going to track her down. Every time she has to program the security system, she thinks about this: how no one knows or cares what happened to her at Cheyenne Mountain, how the people who killed her dad didn’t know who he was, didn’t even know that he was there, or she was there. She finds herself hitting the buttons hard, feeling trapped. Angry.

She supposes she is trapped, in a sense. All the security system does is serve as a reminder that nothing’s going to go back to normal. That she’s not good enough, not important enough, for anyone to worry about, but that there’s still this _thing_ standing between her and the rest of the world. That’s all it does— it just forms this thin shell of a reminder, see-through and sturdy but breakable, like safety glass. It doesn’t protect her. And all it ever warns her about is the occasional possum who likes to go through the garbage or, once, a coyote who curled up on her front step and watched cars pass for what seemed like hours. Chloe had spied on the coyote from her hallway, standing on tiptoes to bring her eye level with the peephole, her face pressed to the painted wood of the door. She had never seen a coyote before. She had to look it up on Google later to make sure that that was what it had been. All she’d known at the time was that it was an animal, something wild.

She hadn’t felt scared of it. Not exactly. She’d held her breath, afraid of making a noise and sending it running. She’d been amazed that there could be so much distance between them, when the tawny end of its tail was close enough for her to touch. She’d felt very peaceful with it there. She liked watching it. Its eyes were the color of amber. She’d wished that it would look at her. _Look at me,_ she’d thought. _Look at me._ But, of course, it couldn’t see her. And after a while, it had gotten up and trotted away into the night.

“Bye,” she’d whispered, and felt stupid for saying it.

A coyote. That’s the most dangerous thing her security system’s detected.

Until she turns off the alarm, opens the door, and finds Nicholas Rush on her sidewalk with a bleeding girl who’s carrying a gun.

* * *

“Oh, my God,” Chloe says. “Dr. _Rush?_ ”

The last time she had seen him, more than a month ago, she’d thought he looked awful— all the stress he’d been under had obviously had an effect, and even leaving aside how he’d lost his temper at that meeting, he’d seemed really thin, brittle-eyed, and tired. But now… The person lying unconscious in the middle of her Halloween decorations is frail to the point of famine, with cavernous shadows under his eyes, and dressed in dirty clothes. He looks like he’s been living on the streets, not like he’s a preeminent mathematician. Meanwhile, the girl—

The girl is leaking blood all over the red brick walkway, and Chloe is pretty sure she’s an escapee from a prison camp. She looks like a prison camp escapee. That’s what they look like, right? A gaunt face and a shaved head and a thousand-yard stare. She can barely hold her gun up, but she stumbles to shield Dr. Rush as though by instinct.

“Please,” she says with a trace of an accent Chloe can’t place. She lets the gun drop. “You must not tell the Stargate mountain. We need your help.”

“Um,” Chloe says inanely. She stares at where blood is dripping down the side of the girl’s hand. It looks exactly like red paint. “I can call 911. I _should_ call 911. You’re _bleeding._ ”

“No!” The girl’s face is very white. There’s a smudge of blood on her cheekbone. “You can’t call anyone. You can’t tell anyone. It’s not safe.”

“But—“ Chloe inexplicably looks over her shoulder, like there might be someone in her house who’ll tell her what to do, or a clue hidden among the antique mirror, the intarsia coffee table, the tufted camelback sofa with its sea foam upholstery over solid oak. There isn’t. The furniture silently and patiently occupies space, prim and polished and unsuited for this particular set of circumstances. “I’m CPR certified,” Chloe says helplessly. “But I don’t— I can’t— You need a hospital! Both of you need a hospital. What’s wrong with him?”

“He has experienced a seizure,” the girl says. “While attempting to prevent an Alliance ship from firing on us. I possess—“ She gestures vaguely at a black satchel in the bushes. “—A computer program that will modulate the electromagnetic interference broadcast by the Lantean transmitters affixed to his head. This will improve his condition. But— _Vfaksh— eyshekh—_ “ She breaks off and raises an uncertain hand to her temple.

Chloe looks at Rush again. There are, she sees this time, _things_ attached to his forehead. Like— _machine_ things. They look like little silver buttons or very small earrings, but they’re glowing. She recognizes the pale blue light. She’s seen it in the piece of Ancient tech that had been handed around at her orientation. That had just been a thermometer, basically, but everyone at the table had laughed nervously when it lit up for some people and not for others, a mark of something that maybe they’d wanted to keep secret, a whole history and genealogy of their bodies that they now couldn’t hide. She’d wanted it to light up for her, but she’d known that it wouldn’t, and it hadn’t. And that had been that— with, you know, a sense that the universe was going to stay at a distance, even though she would’ve maybe liked to discover that she had a place in it— to discover what that place was, what kinds of things came alive when she touched them.

But apparently the universe isn’t going to stay at a distance.

“You’d better come inside,” she says.

* * *

It takes both of them to get Dr. Rush inside, even though he weighs almost nothing. They lay him on the camelback sofa, and Chloe grabs a throw pillow to put under his head. He looks just like he’s sleeping, that way. Like he’s just taking an afternoon nap. Chloe doesn’t know if he takes naps. She suspects he doesn’t.

There are still pieces of straw stuck in his hair, from the little hay bale on the doorstep. Something about that makes her want to scream, or laugh. She reaches forward and plucks one out. It is yellow between her fingers.

The prison camp girl takes it from her with an uncertain look. “This is a grass,” she says, with just the slightest hint of a question.

“It’s, um. Hay. Straw,” Chloe says.

“You are Chloe Armstrong.” —In the same tone, like she’s requesting verification. At least she’s speaking English again.

“Yes,” Chloe says, turning to her. “But I don’t understand why you— oh, no.” The girl has folded clumsily to the floor, her legs splayed under her, looking a little bit like a baby giraffe. “I’ve got a first aid kit in the bathroom. You should take your shirt off so I can look at your arm. I can’t do stitches. I’ll bring you something clean to wear.” She’s aware that she’s saying sentences more-or-less at random. But all of them seem like things that need to be said. How do people decide, in crises, how to order their sentences? Is it like English adjectives, where you never think about which one comes first, but your brain knows the right order just from hearing people say them? She hasn’t been through enough crises to be fluent, and that makes her anxious, because what else will she mess up? What other parts isn’t she fluent in?

“I have to—” the girl says haltingly. “With the computer.” She is struggling with the black satchel. She pulls a perfectly ordinary laptop out of it and thunks it down on the coffee table. Her hand leaves a bloody print on the intarsia. She doesn’t seem to notice.

“I think maybe we should take care of you first,” Chloe says unsurely. “Unless— oh, my God, there aren’t people chasing you, are there? I should have asked you that first. I’m so stupid. Are there people chasing you? Do they have guns? I don’t have a gun.”

The girl stares at her blankly. She doesn’t answer. She seems like maybe she’s overwelmed.

But Chloe figures that if people were chasing them, the girl would probably answer, so eventually she just says, “Um. You know what— just take off your shirt. I’ll get the first aid kit,” and flees upstairs to her bedroom.

The first shirt she sees is a novelty tank top from Target that she grabbed yesterday on a whim while she was stuck in line buying detergent. It’s bright orange, because it’s for Halloween, and it says _If you got it, HAUNT IT_ underneath a cartoon of a cheerful ghost. She picks it up and stares at it for a second, uncomprehending, but she can’t think of a good reason that she shouldn’t give it to the prison camp girl, so she throws it over her shoulder and heads to the bathroom, where she digs for the first aid kit under the sink. It’s just one of those white plastic boxes with gauze and Advil and antibiotic cream and scissors. Chloe really doesn’t think it’s going to do the trick for the kind of injury that leaves blood all over an intarsia table. She doesn’t know what _would_ do the trick. She’s not really prepared to deal with a bleeding-on-the-intarsia-table-style injury.

She’s never really _prepared_. That’s the problem. But at least she’s done the not-being-prepared part before. It’s nothing new. She already knows how badly things will go; knows that she’s going to screw up, that the consequences will be awful. So she can’t really marshal the panic she should be feeling. There’s just a kind of stolid, determined mustering-up.

No. That’s not true. What she feels is something stranger. She doesn’t want to say what she’s feeling, because she thinks she should be ashamed, because, in a weird way, it’s relief. All this time she’s been waiting, and she thought she knew what she was waiting for, but really what she was waiting for was this: for violence to once more touch her with its curious fingers, turn its eye on her, break past the security system and enter her very formal, lonely house.

Once it’s happened then it’s happened, and you don’t have to wait any longer. She hadn’t realized that before.

* * *

“Oh, my _God!_ ” Chloe says when she reaches the bottom of the stairs. She drops the first aid kit.

The prison camp girl is sitting half-naked and cross-legged at the coffee table, typing on her computer. She looks up as Chloe enters, giving her a vague, distracted frown, apparently oblivious to the fact that the abnormally white skin of her chest is almost completely concealed by a enormous mass of swollen, sickly-yellow burns. A _mass_ , Chloe thinks, but— that’s not the right word, is it? It’s a maze. A knot. A topography. A tangle. It climbs up her sternum almost to her collarbone, stretches down across her lower ribcage, and touches the low swell of her breasts. It looks like a crude four-pointed star, except that each of the points bears an ornamentation that incorporates one of its lines into a stargate glyph.

“We are being pursued by the Sixth House of the Lucian Alliance,” the girl says matter-of-factly— answering Chloe’s earlier question. “However, they lack the technology to track the Asgard transporter we used. Additionally, our ship was destroyed in orbit, and so it’s possible that they believe we are dead.”

Chloe crouches very slowly to retrieve the first aid kit from the floor.

The girl continues. “If the Stargate mountain learns of our presence, they will also pursue us. They wish to complete the work of the Lucian Alliance and transpose Rush into being an almost-Ancient against his will. Why do you lack any gun?”

“Um,” Chloe says, not very intelligently.

“Do you prefer a knife?”

“No,” Chloe says. “I mean— I have kitchen knives? They’re Santoku, so they’re really sharp? I’ve never tried to fight anyone with them, though. I mostly use them for… you know… cooking.” She feels really dumb saying that, even though they’re knives _for cooking._ No one _fights with knives_ , unless you’re in, like, _West Side Story._

“I have two guns,” the girl informs her. “You may have one. I left the others in the tel’tak. They are modified zat’nik’tels, and so the one shot only stuns. However, I recommend utilizing two shots. I also have a knife, but this is a more appropriate weapon for Rush, as he has insufficient firearms training.”

“…Right,” Chloe says. “Um. I got you a shirt?” She holds up the shirt. It seems even bright orangier in the downstairs lighting. Like a child’s shirt. The ghost has a polka-dot bow on its head. “And the first aid kit, but I really think you need a doctor. You look _terrible._ ”

The girl pauses her typing and stares at Chloe for a moment, uncomprehending, before she looks down at her chest. A muscle in her jaw jumps. “It’s nothing,” she says. “They are healing. I am suffering a setting-back only.”

“It is _not_ nothing,” Chloe says. “You need— I don’t even know! _Not_ just Neosporin and a Band-Aid. Look— what’s your name?”

This question makes the girl’s jaw tighten further, like she’s struggling with the question. After a moment, she says shortly, “I am Ginn.”

“Okay. Look, Ginn, we have to at least clean everything with alcohol, so you’re going to have to lean against something, or lie down, maybe. I think you should lie down.” Chloe pauses, a thought occurring to her. “Is alcohol bad for hardwoods?”

The girl hunches over the computer. “You are being hysterical.”

“I’m really not.”

“My primary objective is to restore his function. All I require from you is to sew my bicep.”

“To sew your— I can’t do _stitches!”_ Chloe protests. "I told you!"

“You lack a needle?”

“I’m not sticking a _sewing needle_ into your _body;_ oh, my _God!_ ”

The girl huffs out a frustrated breath and shoots Chloe a glare of resentment. “Then I fail to perceive your use.”

Stung, Chloe says, “I’m doing the best I can. I didn’t ask for you to land in my Halloween decorations! I should’ve just called Stargate Command. In fact, I _still_ should. You’re on the run from the _Lucian Alliance?_ You blew up a _spaceship_ in _orbit?_ I’m a _political consultant_ ; I am _not_ qualified to— to— to—“

 _Patch up interstellar political refugees,_ is what she was going to say, but she doesn’t get to say it, because the breath has suddenly left her lungs, and her back is jammed against the railing of the stairway, and the girl— Ginn— is holding a knife to her neck.

It is… _not_ a kitchen knife, Chloe observes inanely. It has a serrated edge, and the blade is slightly hooked, and it’s possible that there might be dried blood by the black handle.

Ginn says fiercely, “You will _not_ call Stargate Command.”Her eyes are the color of the inside of a candle flame, right before you get down to the part that’s blue. They hurt to look at. “If you call Stargate Command, they will take him and they will _torture_ him. I have seen what they will do. I have _done_ it. They will turn off everything that makes him a person, and transform him into a weapon. He will scream, and they will not hear it. He will beg them to stop, and they will not stop. They will lock him to a table and run electricities through his brain. Worse. _Worse._ They know how to do this. Already, _already_ , they have these plans.”

Chloe is intensely aware of the knife’s biting edge, so close that she feels like it’ll cut her if she gets her breath back. Other perceptions are slower to filter in: the hot line of Ginn’s arm digging into her chest, almost feverish and trembling slightly; the ragged, panting sounds that the girl makes when she breathes. She seems more frightened than Chloe is, the main difference being that she has a knife and Chloe doesn’t.

“Okay,” Chloe says, trying to keep her voice quiet and even. “Okay. I’m not going to call them. I promise.” She tries to think: _reframe the problem in positive terms._ “I would feel a lot better if you would let me get you cleaned up. Okay? In fact, I bet we could kill two birds with one stone, and I could do that while you— um— modulate Dr. Rush’s… things.”

Ginn’s brow furrows in an expression of profound confusion. She stares at Chloe. “Why do you wish to utiilize a stone to kill birds? Is it because you lack any gun?”

“Oh— no,” Chloe says, fighting what she suspects would be a slightly crazed smile. Maybe Ginn was right. Maybe she _is_ hysterical. “It’s an expression. I just mean we could do both things at once.”

“Oh.” Now Ginn just looks lost. She goes on staring for another second, then slowly lowers the knife. Her shoulders slump. She doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then another moment. Then: “I don’t know what is a political consultant,” she says. “I did not know who to go to. He had— in his pocket— your—“ She gestures. “How do you say. Business card.”

“Oh,” Chloe says softly. She had almost forgotten. She only ever thinks of that day as the day her dad died. She’d almost forgotten that anything else happened. Like in the whole world, the whole universe. That was how much room it seemed to take up, her dad dying. But other things _had_ happened that day. Other people had gotten hurt. “Yeah. I gave it to him at Cheyenne Mountain. In case I needed his help, or he needed mine. I guess I was… worried about him.”

“Yes,” Ginn says. She looks away abruptly and presses the back of her hand to her mouth, like she’s sick or holding in a sob. “I am also worried about him.”

Chloe risks reaching forward to touch her bare arm, below where it’s injured. “So let’s sit down, and you can work on your computer, and at the very least I can get you disinfected.”

Ginn says, her hand still pressed to her mouth, “If you bring me a needle and cord and a sterile solution, I will be capable to sew my bicep myself.”

“Okay,” Chloe says, although she can’t imagine sticking a sewing needle into her own body, any more than she could imagine sticking it into Ginn’s. She guesses that once you’ve lived through having a bunch of stargate glyphs burned into your body, it must not seem like such a big deal. “I have— um— some dental floss. That’s what people use on TV, instead of thread.”

“TV,” Ginn whispers. She closes her eyes. “You have TV?”

“Of course I have TV,” Chloe says, slightly confused. She points at the mounted flatscreen over the fireplace. Something about the look on Ginn’s face makes her say, “We can turn it on if you want. If it won’t be distracting.”

“Yes, please,” Ginn says, too fast. She stares at the flatscreen with a hollow-eyed kind of hunger. “Tell me what videotapes you possess?”

* * *

So that’s how Chloe ends up explaining DVDs and DVR and Netflix to a half-naked knife-wielding girl who’s probably an alien, although Chloe’s afraid that it might be impolite to ask about that. Ginn’s definitely typing in a language that Chloe recognizes as Ancient, although Chloe can’t understand any of it. She’s also typing what looks like super-advanced stuff _really fast_ , pausing only to lift her arms in this or that direction so that Chloe can dab at her chest with gauze pads soaked in alcohol, and then with Neosporin.

“I’ll go to CVS tomorrow,” Chloe says, over the episode of _Grey’s Anatomy_ that’s playing in the background. She’s talking out loud partly to distract herself from the blush that’s crept up her cheeks. It’s not like she’s never seen another girl’s naked breasts before; she went to an all-girls school, for God’s sake. But something about the peculiarity of the situation makes this feel different, or else it’s different when she actually has to touch that other girl’s skin— suffer through the weird agonizing intimacy of contact. “I can pick up some more gauze and Advil,” she hurriedly adds, “and I think they might have some kind of ointment specifically for burns.”

“Mm,” Ginn says distractedly, her attention split between the TV and her computer.

“Tell me when you can put the computer down for a second, and I’ll just kind of… wrap everything up as best as I can, I guess. Then you can at least put my shirt on. Maybe I should buy you some clothes, too. Sorry, but I think your shirt is pretty much, um, done for.” Chloe glances across the room, to where the leather top that Ginn had been wearing is currently stiffening into a kind of gross, misshapen, bloody mess. Forget alcohol; she hopes that _blood_ isn’t bad for the hardwoods.

“It’s not my shirt,” Ginn says, still absorbed in her typing. Her mouth forms a tense line. “It belonged to a man who was… _ikh tamer;_ a— son-of-a-bitch? Yes. A son-of-a-bitch.”

“Oh,” Chloe says.

“I took it from him after I killed him.”

“…Oh,” Chloe says again. She thinks she shouldn’t be so shocked; she’s probably really very naive considering that she wants to work in intergalactic politics. But: there it is. It gives her pause. At least, she thinks, it's a distraction from the nakedness of Ginn's body. She goes quiet while she finishes cleaning Ginn’s chest. “Was he… Was he the one who did this to you?” she finally ventures.

“No,” Ginn says without looking up.

There’s a brief silence. Just as Chloe’s about to try to move the conversation to a less upsetting topic, Ginn stops typing and makes a frustrated noise.

“He should wake up,” she says, sounding fretful. “Why is he not awoken? I have _compensated_ for the electrophysiological alterations; I am producing a field of interference that ought to mute his brainwaves to precisely their biologically natural state!”

Chloe looks doubtfully at the sofa where Dr. Rush is sleeping, or— well, unconsciousness is probably different from sleep. “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe he just needs to, you know, rest for a little bit. Even before… whatever happened to him… he seemed like he needed a lot more sleep than he was getting. Here, sit up.”

Ginn, looking resentful, straightens and raises her arms so that Chloe can start taping lots of bandages to her and covering them up in big winding loops of medical wrap. Chloe can’t help noticing, with an odd, complicated pang that lands somewhere between pity and amusement, that she has patches of very soft red hair under her arms. It’s hard to tell from the stubble on her head that she’s ginger. Knowing that she is makes Chloe feel like she’s more human. That’s probably a silly thought. _Is_ she even human, if she’s technically an alien?

“What if—” Ginn says haltingly. Her face is averted, but Chloe glances up for a second and catches the look she’s giving Rush: a look of such naked fear and grief and guilt that just the one moment of it punches out Chloe’s breath. Human, Chloe thinks. Definitely human. “What if he does not wake up?”

Chloe stays kneeling beside her and lets her hands rest on her lap. “Well,” she says at last, “I think we have a couple of options. There are at least one or two people I could call— politicians who work with the Stargate program— who might be able to help. But I think the first thing they’d do would be call the military. The problem is: from their perspective, we might just be kind of a couple of silly girls. And… not that I don’t believe you, about the torture and the electricity and, you know, the secret military plans, but it does all sound pretty…” She searches for a polite word. “Extreme.”

Ginn says, in a flat voice fraught with misery, “And they will say— after all, I am Lucian Alliance.”

That was something else that Chloe had kind of wondered about. Mostly the people who show up from space carrying guns and wearing a lot of black leather tend to all have the same affiliation. So she’s given to understand. Hearing it confirmed makes her feel…

The Lucian Alliance killed her dad, is the thing.

She wonders where Ginn was during that attack.

She doesn’t ask, because she doesn’t want to know the answer.

She stands up very abruptly instead, and goes to grab the orange tank top off the couch. “Here,” she says, tossing it to Ginn. “You can wear that until I have a chance to go shopping.”

With a wary expression, Ginn inspects the shirt. “It is extremely colorful,” she says dubiously.

“It’s just a shirt,” Chloe says shortly.

Ginn glances at her and then slowly tugs the shirt over her head. “What is the alternative option?” she asks.

“What?”

“You articulated ‘a couple of options,’ implying a set of more than one member.”

“Oh,” Chloe says. “I mean, we could also take him to just a regular doctor. Not someone in the military. But they might not be able to help _and_ the first thing they do might be call the military, if we told them what happened. So either way we’re kind of screwed.”

“Screwed,” Ginn echoes, sounding like she’s not entirely sure she knows what the word means.

“But really I think… It kind of sounds like you guys have been through a lot?” Chloe lets the sentence become more of a question, because, really, she doesn’t know what they’ve been through, she thinks; she doesn’t know the half of it.

Ginn looks down. One of her hands goes to her head; it slowly sweeps over her stubbled scalp and pauses when it encounters the ridge of one scar, then another. “Yes,” she whispers. “We have been through a lot.”

“So it makes sense that he wouldn’t bounce back right away,” Chloe says. “Is all I’m saying.”

Which, of course, is when Dr. Rush decides to bounce back.

* * *

The first thing that Chloe notices is that the TV’s turned to static. She hears the white noise roar of it and looks over her shoulder, confused. Then there’s an audible click and dying sound as the power in the townhouse cuts out, killing the lights and leaving her and Ginn immersed in the blue fog of evening.

—A very blue, very foggy evening, Chloe realizes, and goes to the window to look out. The lantern-shaped streetlamp that stands on her bucolic Georgetown corner isn’t glowing yellow, like it usually does. All the way down the opposite side of the street, the three-tiered row of houses stands dark. No lights in windows, no underwater glow of TV screens or computers… no power.

“That’s strange,” she says, frowning. “Usually we only have power cuts in the summer.”

Sounding dismayed, Ginn says, “Oh… I wonder if there exists a possibility that… I am afraid the transmitters may not be any longer wholly operational.”

Chloe turns to ask her what she means.

The power flares back to life.

It flares back to life _a lot._ The TV flicks on with its volume hiked up to about a million, and Chloe’s iPod, in its dock, starts blaring Vampire Weekend. The cheery, hopping beat of “Oxford Comma” seems incredibly surreal over the melodrama of _Grey’s Anatomy_ , and then the channel starts to flip: Jack and Rose cling to a drifting ship door in  _Titanic_ ; two hockey players slam each other into the ice; Lawrence of Arabia poses on top of a train; a girl dances in a Bollywood movie, accentuated by multiple zoom-ins.  _A_ _ll your diction, dripping with disdain,_  Ezra Koenig sings. _Even through the pain, I always tell the truth…_ Every light in the townhouse is on, too, and Chloe’s Roomba zooms out from under the sofa to start roaming the hardwood floor.

Chloe manages to grab the remote and turns the TV off while Ginn is retreating anxiously from the Roomba, practically crawling up the back of an armchair with her feet tucked under her.

 _Who gives a fuck about an Oxford climber?_ the song continues.  _I climbed to Dharamsala too, I did…_

“What the fuck is happening?” Chloe demands, her voice climbing several pitches.

The music cuts out.

Rush sits up.

“Christ,” he says with a groan, sounding extremely hungover. “My head is gawping. What the _fuck_ did I do last night? And—” He opens his eyes, squinting behind his crooked, smudgy glasses, and eyes Chloe and Ginn with a slowly dawning look of bewilderment. His mouth opens and closes a few times before he finally manages to come out with: “Who the _fuck_ are you?"


	43. Fugue, Pt. 2: D

Apparently, whenever Alaniz had filed the request for Young’s sleeping medication, she’d told somebody in charge of his detainment that he was also suffering from Vitamin D deficiency. Young didn’t think that was true; he was pretty sure you couldn’t get Vitamin D deficiency from just a couple weeks in prison. But because he had such serious medical problems, the infirmary staff kind of got to call the shots with him— no one wanted to be the guy who accidentally killed a potential intelligence source, and probably one or two of the MPs were hedging their bets when it came to whether or not he’d get his rank back—so two guards started taking him above the surface for an hour of sunlight a couple of times a week. It wasn’t much: just wandering around a corner of parkland in handcuffs, watching birds or sometimes sitting on a rock, if his hip was feeling up to sitting. He hadn’t really cared about the sunlight, but he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed everything else, everything about being outdoors— the crunch of cast-off deciduous leaves and pine needles; the hot ground and the cooler places where it wasn’t hot, where water gathered; the little warbles of animals who were out of sight. It was autumn now— hell, it was the end of October— and he almost hadn’t gotten to see it. It was like being back in the hospital again.

The first time he went up there he’d felt drunk, almost. He’d knelt in the dirt, still wearing the dark blue scrubs, and dug his fingertips into the dry soil at the surface. It left dust stains on his skin. The sun had lain on top of him like it was physically pressing him earthwards, a force heavier than he could throw off or carry. He’d wanted to lie there and not get up, in spite of the little brown ants that beetled every which way if you looked close enough, doing their unknowable ant work. Not that he was suicidal or something. He was just so tired.

He’d slept heavy that night for the first time in ages, and had a very peaceful but confusing dream in which he was lying there, just like he’d wanted, on the warm earth, in the tall grass, waiting for something to happen. The night was very black. He could hear the restful sounds of animals in the dark, somewhere behind him, like he’d been herding cattle over the river and stopped to make camp. But he didn’t think they were cattle. He didn’t know what they were. It didn’t worry him. He closed his eyes and let himself dissolve into the warm soil, until he was nothing. Everything would be all right now, he thought.

* * *

One day, towards the end of his interrogation, the guards brought him up there and he found Camile Wray waiting for him. He thought he was imagining her at first; she was such an incongruous figure, perched on a boulder in her pinstripe skirt suit, with little glittering peridots catching the light by her ears. And it wouldn’t have surprised him to find out he was going crazy. But she said to the marines who were guarding him, “Guys. Give us a minute,” and they went and stood about six feet away, with their backs turned. So that was independent verification.

He stared at her.

She squinted at him through the sunlight. “God,” she said, “you look terrible. I mean, you always look terrible, but you look a lot more terrible up here.”

Young didn’t know what to say to that. “Is this…” he managed at last. His voice sounded rusty. “Is this supposed to be some kind of prison break?”

Wray laughed. “Sorry. No. Can you imagine? Sure, they sent a five-foot three-inch civilian to cut you loose.”

“Well,” Young said, “I don’t know. I’ve met some pretty scrappy civilians.” He looked up and away towards the end of the sentence so that she wouldn’t see his eyes and know he was thinking about Rush.

But she knew anyway, he guessed, because her smile faded. There was a silence.

Young cleared his throat and rubbed one of his cuffed hands over his chin. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of day, he realized. He rarely got up the energy to do it. He didn’t even look at himself in the mirror anymore; what did he care how he looked? “So what can I do you for?” he asked. “I’m usually a captive audience; why wait till I’m up here? Is it just the thrill of the chase?”

Her smile returned, quieter and more formal. “I find that captive audiences tends to come with their own built-in audiences, regardless of whether or not one feels like performing at the time.”

Young tilted his head at this oblique acknowledgement of the surveillance. He didn’t say anything.

Wray said, “I thought maybe we could have a more private chat.”

“Okay,” Young said warily. “I mean, I got to tell you, if this is some kind of… I don’t know, ploy to try and get me to spill all my secrets, I’ve been nothing but truthful in there. I’ve pretty much got no secrets left.”

Wray shook her head. “No one seriously thinks you’re a traitor at this point. Stupid, maybe— definitely a little bit too eager to trust— but not a traitor.”

“Thanks,” Young said, stung.

She said pointedly, “You’re welcome. By the end of the week, if you’re lucky, we should be ready to start identifying the areas of your memory that are corrupted and accessing what, if anything, is left underneath.”

Young grimaced. “Great. Sounds like fun.”

“Well,” she said with a shrug, “it is what it is.”

Young glanced sidelong at her. Something about her— her practical, square-shouldered, and unapologetic solidity— rubbed him the right way. It was almost reassuring. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but I think you might be one of the most military civilians I’ve ever met.”

“Oh, I know,” Wray said with a wry look. “I should’ve gone into the Navy. That’s where they keep all the hot chicks.”

Young was surprised by a laugh. It seemed to hack its way out of him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed; the machinery needed oiling. But then for some reason a spasm of pain went through him, and he had to twist his face and work hard to keep breathing evenly. “Right,” he whispered.

Wray watched him in silence. She didn’t ask if he was okay, which he appreciated. She seemed like she already knew that he wasn’t, and why he wasn’t, and that there was nothing she could do about it. After a while, she looked away and said, “I received a very interesting intelligence briefing yesterday from General O’Neill.”

“Oh, yeah?” Young was gazing fixedly at a pine cone, trying to get his composure back. “And what’s—“

She cut him off: “We have reason to believe that the Lucian Alliance may have lost Rush.”

Young’s mouth stayed slightly open, although he didn’t finish his sentence.

He could taste the sun on the air and in the dirt, baked into everything, the late-in-the-year weariness of the land, the very faint hint of approaching frost from on the mountains.

It was like she had punched all the breath out of him without moving a muscle.

“Oh,” he said at last.

“Oh?” Wray repeated.

“That’s— I mean, do you know— Fuck, I have to— Sorry; sorry, I have to—“ He swallowed convulsively and turned his back on her, taking huge staggering gasps of air now that he was breathing. He felt over-oxygenated and emotionally volatile, like it was fifty-fifty whether he was going to punch something or his eyes were going to well up.

Wray said quietly, “The word in the Third House of the Lucian Alliance is that Sixth House has just lost a very valuable asset, variously described as a prisoner or a weapon— stolen by a defector.”

“Oh, Christ.” Young bent over, resting his hands on his thighs.

“Given the lack of any contact from Colonel Telford, Stargate Command believes that the defector may be—“

“Ginn,” Young whispered.

“Yes.”

“I thought she was dead.” His voice cracked. “I thought that David, that I— Christ, she’s just a kid. She likes movies.”

“ _If_ she’s the one who broke Rush out, the military might consider adding movies to its training module.” Wray’s voice was gentle, faintly amused, with the slightest barb to it.

“I—“ Young said. He was still struggling. “I mean, do they know where they are? Are they okay?” _Is Rush okay_ , he meant, God help him. He was picturing—

“There’s been no communication of any kind,” Wray said. “However—“

—what the Lucian Alliance could do to someone like Rush. What the SGC had wanted to do to him, the diagrams that he couldn’t get out of his head, what that much electricity would do to someone, what Rush had looked like when he was seizing in the infirmary, the expression on his face just confused, mostly, heartbreakingly perplexed, as though he didn’t understand why this was happening to his body, why he no longer had control of his hands, why—

“—Three days ago,” Wray said, “the _Odyssey_ registered an explosion just outside of Earth’s orbit, and after proceeding to the scene—“

—his back was arching, and sometimes he’d looked at Young, or maybe he hadn’t even known he was looking at Young, but it’d felt like he was looking to Young for answers, silently trusting him to explain, but this time there would’ve been no Young there, so what had _happened_ to him—

“—found mechanical debris consistent with what you would expect from a Lucian Alliance tel’tak.”

Young took a while to process this. He said finally, “Mechanical debris.”

“Yes.” Wray was watching him. He could feel the cool weight of her gaze. “We don’t believe that anyone was killed in the explosion.”

Young let out another too-large breath.

“We don’t know that this ship had anything to do with them— or even, verifiably, that there _is_ a them.”

“But,” Young said. Some of his higher processes were slowly starting to return, enough that it occurred to him that there was a point to this conversation. He might have thought she was doing it for sentimental reasons, if she hadn’t been the most military civilian he’d ever met.

Wray said, “The consensus is that it’s worth exploring the possibility that Rush is on Earth, and that he’s been, for whatever reason, unable or unwilling to contact Stargate Command or the IOA for assistance.”

“Well, gee,” Young said, his voice not quite flat, but mean. “I wonder why _that_ would be. It’s not like we got him got him kidnapped and _probably_ tortured, like we were planning to _experiment_ on him with alien technology, like we lied to him from the very first time we sent Daniel fucking ‘Sunshine’ Jackson to lure him away from whatever little scrap of a life he’d managed to wring out of this incredibly fucked-up world, and then we stuck him in an apartment complex with someone who might not be a traitor, but who’s definitely stupid and so eager to trust that he—“ He broke off, breathing hard.

Wray looked down. Delicately, she moved one of her feet away from a thistle patch where a bee was laboriously trying to summit a purple blossom. “I take your point,” she said at last. “Dr. Rush has some very valid reasons to doubt the Stargate program’s investment in his safety.”

“He should stay the hell away from us,” Young said bitterly.

“Perhaps he _should’ve_ stayed the hell away from us. But if he _has_ escaped the Lucian Alliance, he’s on the run from a very powerful and very dangerous organization that is enormously invested in locating him. We have no way of knowing his mental or physical status. He’s a university professor; he failed his initial evaluation to even go through the stargate. Do you really want him out there on his own?”

“I hope he’s not on his own,” Young said, failing to keep his voice even.

Christ; Christ, he hoped Rush wasn’t alone. He tried to picture Rush and Ginn holed up in some shitty motel, Rush bitching himself blind while Ginn forced him to watch b-movies and eat pizza. Maybe they were drinking milkshakes. Maybe they’d stolen another car. They were fine. Ginn was wearing that awful gas station shirt, the one she was so attached to. He couldn’t remember if she’d been wearing it the day that she’d disappeared. He hadn’t paid enough attention to her to remember.

Wray sighed. Abruptly, with an air of exaggeration that suggested she was making a deliberate gesture, she shrugged herself out of her suit jacket and untucked her blouse.

Young eyed her, uncomprehending. The weather was warm, for autumn, but not that warm.

“Girls school,” she said, to his look. “When I was a kid. We weren’t allowed to wear our shirttails untucked, so that’s what we always did when the last bell rang. To signal that the school day was over.”

Young said, still not understanding, “Okay…?”

“I’m here to ask you a question, or really to ask for your help, because it turns out that you’re the only person on Earth who might have the slightest fucking clue, pardon my French, where Nicholas Rush would go if he were on the run. And believe me, in the three days since that ship blew up— in the day-and-a-half since that intel came in— Stargate Command has made a pretty thorough survey of what turns out to be an impressively sparse interpersonal life.”

“Yeah,” Young said, not looking at her. “I… can’t say I’m surprised.”

“So that’s why I’m here.” Wray huffed out a breath that was not quite another sigh. “But I don’t know how we have that conversation without having the conversation we’re not having, and, to be honest, I think having it would do you some good. So: the school day is over. I don’t know how much more obvious I can make it. I’m not here to rat you out. Why do you think they sent _me?_ It’s a very special kind of affirmative action: let’s send the dyke in.”

“That— actually doesn’t matter to me,” Young said.

“Good. It shouldn’t. I’ve known generals— well, Army; I can’t speak to Air Force— with twenty-year ‘roommates’ who would turn around and eat you alive.”

Young felt a muscle in his jaw work. “They would, huh?” he said. “They would, because— why?”

He found that he was suddenly angry; furious, in fact, because she wouldn’t say it; she wouldn’t make the accusation; she wouldn’t _level the accusation at him_ ; all through the interrogation, they’d all tried to say it without saying it, tried to trick _him_ into saying it, like saying one of a limited set of magic words would suddenly _make him that thing_ , and he’d never be able to undo the magic, and Jesus H. Christ, it was some powerful magic, some of that real voodoo shit, because it would take away everything in his life, everything that he’d worked for. It’d already _started_ to take away everything in his life, like it could reach back in time from some point where he or Wray or somebody else had said the word already, like someone dropping a rock into the still pond that was him, and all the ripples were running towards him in every direction. Erasing. Erasing. No more house, no more yard, no more wife; no more job, no more career, no more friends from work; he already didn’t have a body that did what it was supposed to, so they couldn’t take that away from him, but still, in the end, he’d be stripped down to nothing. Just— naked. That was what would happen when someone said the word.

Wray looked at him like she knew what he was thinking, but then she always looked at him that way. She didn’t say anything.

“I’m not—“ Young said, chopping the words short. “—Whatever it is you think.”

“Okay,” Wray said softly.

“I’m getting cleared. I’m going back into the Air Force after this.”

“I’m sure you are. You seem like a very determined person.”

“I want my life back. I want my _life_ back,” he said, and dug his fist into his hip in a way he hadn’t in a long time, just to feel the pain where the muscles stretched over bone. At least the pain was real, he thought. The pain had always been real. His body was the one thing that didn’t lie. “I had a life; I was supposed to have a _life_ ; and now I’m living in a prison cell, getting told that I’m stupid, that I’m untrustworthy, that I’m a traitor. And the worst part is that I can’t figure out which one. Which one of me is stupid. Which one of me is untrustworthy. Which one of me fucked up so bad. Because there’s two of me, right? There’s the me that David made up in a Lucian Alliance prison cell, I guess, and then there’s the other me. But I don’t know which is which. I don’t know which one I am. Maybe the _real_ me, the first me, doesn’t give a fuck about Rush. You ever thought that?”

“I’ve been talking to you for two-and-a-half weeks,” Wray said quietly. “I’m pretty sure there’s no version of you that doesn’t give a fuck about Nicholas Rush.”

“You don’t know that,” Young said raggedly. “You don’t _know_ that. Maybe I would’ve gotten my act together. Maybe my wife wouldn’t’ve divorced me. I would’ve come to my senses. I would’ve moved back into the house. The real me.”

Wray was watching him with a steady expression and a searching, slightly furrowed brow. “Is that what you want?”

Young’s frustrated gesture was spoiled by the handcuffs. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know anymore. I don’t want any of this.” He aimed a kick at a stray rock and sent it hurtling towards a pine tree. “I want him to be okay. Rush. You know? Whatever— whatever happens to me. He didn’t ask for this. He doesn’t deserve it. Not that he’s some great person; he’s a terrible person, actually. He wouldn’t mind me saying that— he works really hard at it, being a terrible person. I think it’s like his hobby or something. But still, he still just— he got under my skin. And you can’t hate something that’s under your skin like that. It’s just _there;_ it’s part of your body, for better or for worse, and you just— you _feel_ different, you move different, and when someone takes it away—“

His voice had turned raw. He looked down, staring at a pile of dead leaves: burnt ocher.

“I don’t know,” he repeated roughly. “I just— Whatever you think I am, I’m not right now. I’m not anything. At all.”

Wray was quiet. “Well,” she said eventually, “maybe you should start there. With wanting him to be okay. I’d say there are more incriminating things to want.”

Young laughed, choppy.

“And whether it’s real or not—“ She shrugged. “It is what it is. Like I said. You have to start somewhere, after all. You have to draw a line under it. You’re going to have to have a life after this, regardless of what you do or don’t get back.”

“Thanks. That’s very reassuring,” Young said.

“Do you want to be reassured?”

He shook his head.

“I didn’t think so.” She stretched her legs out and crossed her ankles. “So let’s talk. About Rush. And maybe tomorrow you’ll wake up in your cell and know that one more thing you can rely on has happened. You helped a person you wanted to help. You’ve got some time to figure out the rest.”

“Yeah. One thing I’m not short on is time.” Young shot her a hard glance, not necessarily hostile. “Don’t think it escapes my notice that everything you just said gets me to do exactly what you wanted.”

Wray smiled sharply. “Not so eager to trust anymore?”

“Once burned,” Young said shortly. “And all that.”

“Well. Will wonders never cease. Perhaps there’s an Icarus Project leader hiding in there after all.” Young’s face must have betrayed his visceral repulsion, because she said, “Who better, do you think? —If we’re going to salvage anything from this mess, even if it’s just ourselves. Think about it.”

“You and Jackson,” Young said resignedly. But he didn’t say no. Wray wasn’t wrong, he thought— less about salvaging something from the mess, although she might not be wrong about that; he’d learned something from all of this. He was going to play his cards close.

He walked away a couple of feet and reached out his hands to the rough trunk of a pine tree. His fingertips took the measure of its texture. It was a ponderosa, he thought. Colorado Springs had a lot of the same trees he’d grown up with, the big old native trees of the West.

“Rush,” he said, drawing the name out. “The problem with Rush is that about half of what he does at any given moment is showing-off. Or just— a show, like a performance. He’ll say or do whatever he thinks is going to get him the reaction he wants. If he’s alone…” His voice trailed off. He was thinking this through as he said it. “I mean, that’s how you find someone, right? The things they want. The little fixed things, the likes and habits, the things that make them a person. But Rush sort of… I mean, if you leave him alone, he’ll just sort of forget to eat, but then he’ll spend ten thousand dollars on kitchen gadgets that boil special kinds of pasta, and a coffeemaker that, like, replicates the vacuum of space. He’ll throw a tantrum if he has to sleep on the couch or doesn’t get a locally sourced latte, but put him on a lifeless alien planet and send him through a Ancient test that kills him over and over, and he’ll tell you he’s doing just fine. You see what I mean? It’s all bullshit; I don’t think he really wants anything. Not anything he knows how to get.” He fell silent for a moment. “A good computer, maybe.”

Talking about it brought the memories back. Maybe he’d thought that, after the weeks of interrogation, he couldn’t feel anything anymore, that there was nothing left. He’d worked so hard to put it away, to jam the gears of his emotions. He pictured himself hurling branches into them, big sturdy oak branches, not the spindly ones you got from pines. Shoving them so far down that the teeth of the gears stopped chewing. And it had seemed to him that the teeth had stopped. But now, today, the gears kept trying to grind, and they were grinding him in them. He thought of Rush little-and-furious in the gas station sweatshirt; he thought of Rush asleep on his shoulder. He thought of the faint nicotine flavor of that kiss, something that sounded unappealing but in fact had been like the last of the smoke from a wildfire, an edge of heat, just enough so that you knew the possibility was there.

His chest ached. He stared down at the tree’s red bark under his fingers. He was conscious of its unanticipated warmth. “So,” he said. “Sorry to break it to you, but your best bet is probably going to be keeping your ear to the ground for any reports of short, histrionic Scotsmen.”

Wray tilted her head thoughtfully. “What about the girl?”

“Ginn? Well, if you were _just_ looking for her, I’d say to follow the trail of junk food and videotapes. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that if she _is_ with Rush, she’ll do whatever he tells her. So if he wants to stay under the radar— no dice.”

“And what if—“ Wray hesitated almost imperceptibly. “What if the Lucian defector referred to in the report _were_ Colonel Telford? I suppose it’s not out of the realm of the possibility that he might opt not to contact Stargate Command.”

Young pushed himself abruptly back from the tree. “You know, I’d love to talk about David, but I think I’m out of time here.”

Wray didn’t so much as lift an eyebrow. “You’re not.”

“Really?” He eyed her levelly. “I’m pretty sure I am. Hey, fellas,” he said, raising his voice to reach the guards on the other side of the clearing. “Time to head back.”

Wray raised a hand to halt the guards. “You’d sit in a prison cell underground just to avoid talking about him?” she said, sounding disbelieving.

“Look, I never asked for any special favors in the first place.” Young pointed a finger at her. “It’s not like we made a _deal._ They don’t let me out on a leash as some kind of reward for good behavior.”

“They let you out because you needed it,” Wray said. There was a note in her voice that was not as hard as Young had expected; deprived of the resistance he’d prepared for, he found himself floundering somewhat. Wray continued, in the same tone: “Young, have you _seen_ yourself? You’re dying in there.”

“That’s _bullshit_ ,” Young said fiercely. “You think I can’t hack it? I can fucking hack it. I’m a goddamn colonel in the US Air Force.”

Wray shook her head. A lock of her smooth black hair had fallen forwards, into her face; with very precise, manicured fingers, she pushed it back. “God,” she said. “I take it back: I definitely shouldn’t’ve gone into the Navy. Stuck on a boat with a thousand versions of _you_ , all of them grimly toiling away all day long trying to make their lives as hard as possible, so no one can ever say they couldn’t hack it? I’d throw myself overboard.”

“Bold of you to assume that anyone in the Navy can hack it.” Young turned his back on her and started towards the guards. One way or another, he was leaving.

From behind him, Wray said, “Do you know the story of Antaeus?”

“No,” Young said. “As Rush never got tired of reminding me, I’m a dumbass.”

“He was a giant that Hercules defeated, as one of the twelve labors. He’d killed everyone he’d ever faced in battle, because he was the son of Earth, and as long as he stood upon the earth, he couldn’t be defeated. But as soon as there was no solid ground under him…” She let her voice trail off.

Young stopped, but didn’t turn. His hands were clenched at his sides. “I’m sure you think that’s really deep,” he said. “Lots of layers of meaning. Solid ground. That’s a nice one. But you seem to be overlooking one important fact.”

“What’s that?” Wray asked.

“He _couldn’t be defeated_. So: if I’m supposed to be this guy? It seems like your analogy is crap.”

Wray sighed heavily. “Young,” she said. “Everett. Come back and sit the fuck down, would you? You don’t have to say anything. We can just… sit in the sun.”

Young’s instinct was to be wary. But, after all, he thought, he could always leave if she started talking. And the truth was that he didn’t want to go back inside. It wasn’t the sun, and it wasn’t the cell; it wasn’t even the reminder of the hospital. It was the sterility. He couldn’t stand the _cleanliness_ of the cell: its tight measured corners, the evenness of the walls’ white paint. He felt that nothing had ever been born or died there. It inspired a weird panic in him. Everything had always been the same; he was trapped in a sealed box forever. He didn’t have to be out in the wilderness, but he wanted to be _outside._

Finally he turned back. “We’ll sit in the sunshine,” he said, in a confrontational tone. “And tomorrow you’ll show up in front of that goddamn window and interrogate me some more. Is that how it is?”

“That’s how it is,” Wray said. She looked perfectly composed, with her pinstripe jacket held in her lap. “For now. Not forever. Things will get better. I’ll try to find a way to tell you, if we have any news.”

Young rubbed his forehead with the thumb of one of his cuffed hands. “What would you get out of that?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I know,” Wray said.

A dragonfly drifted through the clearing between them, the long stick of its body looking weightless between the stained-glass wings. It hung for a while almost equidistant from their two positions, just— floating. It seemed to bring silence with it.

Wray’s eyes followed it. “They’re lucky,” she said.

“Dragonflies?”

“In China people think so. That’s what my father says. I don’t know if it’s because it’s more common to find them in amber there. There’s a lot of amber in China. But I’ve always thought it’s sad, seeing them like that. They look… heavy.”

Young looked away from the dragonfly, and from her. “I can’t sit,” he said. “Because of my hip. I mean, it’s hard for me.”

For some reason, this too seemed to make Wray sad. “Right,” she said quietly. “Well—“

“I don’t mind standing.”

So he stood in the sunlight till his hour was over, watching as the dragonfly made pass after pass over the unruly autumn wildflowers of the clearing, seeming not to know how to escape its suddenly circular existence, or else in search of something it was on the edge of finding, but couldn’t quite spot yet. At last it hummed off into the shadow of the trees on the hillside, leaving Young no clearer about what it had been seeking.

“Time’s up,” Wray said.


	44. Fugue, Pt. 3: A

_Rush—_

The hallmark of sentience was self-awareness, and he possessed self-awareness, because he knew that he was Rush. Nicholas Rush: that was him. That was the value assigned to this variable. By “variable” he was, of course, referring to the body that was currently occupying a very posh sofa. Apparently he possessed sofa-awareness, because he knew that it was a sofa and that it was posh.

The set of his knowledge contained additional items. He knew, for instance, what a set was. He knew that he had a head, and that it hurt. He was cognisant of a substantial amount of chaos, internal or external; a sense that there were things that could not be put into the correct order— that exceeded the number of dimensions his in-built mathematics could cope with and/or simply would not stay where he had put them; that continued to move, like a flurry of words that did not want to stay in a book. Perhaps this was why his head hurt. It certainly made him feel queasy.

“Christ,” he said aloud, “my head is gawping. What the fuck did I do last night?”

And he knew what queasiness was, so he possessed sick-awareness. He knew his stomach from a sofa cushion. He was at least forty percent certain that he was not about to be sick, in spite of the fact that—

_—opened—_

“And who the _fuck_ are you?” he said.

The two girls regarding him from across the limited stretch of this unlikely domicile were about undergraduate-age, in his estimate, although he did not know where he had come by his unshakeable confidence that he could estimate the age of an undergraduate. One was a skinhead clad in dirty jeans and a bright-orange novelty tank top, whilst the other might have stepped out of a Miss Selfridge catalogue.

He possessed, apparently, Miss-Selfridge-awareness.

“Dr. Rush?” the Miss Selfridge girl said in a quavering voice.

“Yes,” Rush said. “Obviously. Obviously I’m Rush.”

He was at least forty percent certain that he was not about to be sick, in spite of the fact that—

_—his—_

The world reeled around him. The world was a polished living room in a posh fucking flat. He possessed flat-awareness and he possessed posh-awareness, which he had noted previously but neglected to add to the fucking list. However, he was lacking in a fairly significant form of awareness. To wit: he had absolutely no fucking idea where he was or how he had come to be there.

He closed his eyes and pressed an unsteady hand to his head. “Fuck,” he said. His hand was shaking. Both of his hands were shaking. He was certain that they had not used to shake, but no credible evidence presented itself in support of this certainty. “ _Fuck,”_ he said again.

Something about his voice was not right. Was it? It wasn’t. He was an orchestra, he felt, or— no, he was an oratorio, or— no, what he meant to say was that he was a chorale. He could produce a range of different voices, and this presented a difficulty, because he did not know which one was his.

Panic cracked through some eggshell inside of him. He did not know his own voice. He _had_ no voice. _I have no mouth,_ he thought. _I have no mouth and I must scream._ He possessed Ellison-awareness, but he did not possess the awareness that he _needed_. He did not possess yesterday-awareness. He did not possess last-year-awareness. Everything was there, but it was fucking emulsified. Someone had stuck a very thin needle inside and scrambled the egg. He could not access the embryonic whatever-the-fuck-had-been-gestating, which, presumably, had been him. It was a smear across the substrate, its individual awarenesses repurposed. He could see them. He could touch them. They were _him. He_ was the repurposer. He was the poacher. Something had been poached, and he was it.

   _—eyes._

“My name is Nicholas Rush,” he said, suddenly seized by a sense of panic that someone would come along and perform the same sort of poaching. Perhaps the original him would do it, the ghost whose body he had dismantled. If such a thing could be done once then it could be done over and over; there could be no guarantee that he would continue _being_ from moment to moment. But if he articulated the things that he knew of himself, then they would be real. They would not vanish like sea foam back into the undifferentiated mass of the ocean. They would be written-down. He would not forget. “My name is _Nicholas Rush_ ,” he said again. “Nicholas Rush. I was born in Govan. The twenty-second of March, 1964. My parents— I don’t know; I don’t know. A radio. The shipyard. The river. My glasses. A tooth. A hole in the wall. The Carboniferous. I’m a cryptanalyst. I have— I had— I— my wife. Gloria Leith-Gower. She plays— played— the violin. The opening of the Mendelssohn concerto. Tchaikovsky. The _molto sostenuto_. I stepped on her music. I take my coffee with cream. I kicked— I kicked a stone, but I don’t remember _where._ Buffalo. Jellyfish. I pricked my finger. There was a crack in the roof, the roof of something, it was _important_ , and I don’t _remember!_ ”

“Dr. Rush, it’s all right,” one of the girls said.

But it was not all right.

He was experiencing what he recognised as a nervous reaction. His breastbone hurt and his breath was coming short. He could not seem to get enough air in. He shoved himself back on the sofa. It was the wrong sofa. His nails scraped against sea-green velour instead of cowhide. He could not push his face to it and inhale a burnt-smoke Western scent, and to do so was vital for a reason that he could not access. Pine trees stirring in the darkness. Sagebrush bleached and rustling in his high beams. He folded his arms over his head. “Gloria,” he managed, nonsensically, because Gloria was dead, wasn’t she; he might not know where he was, but he always knew that. “Gloria, please; I don’t want to be here; Gloria—“

Something was happening around him. Lights were stuttering; there was noise; a doorbell filled the room with artificial chiming, abruptly superceded by the shrill tone of an alarm; too many voices were shouting at one another, and another alarm was sounding, and he tasted minerals. Something liquid. Salt. He thought that he could taste each separate chemical element and identify their isotopes, and this made him feel strange, and it occurred to him that his nose was bleeding, and the notion filtered through to him that this was it: that after this there would be no him, or rather that he would not be him, and he said in an agony whose emotion had no adjective via which it could be expressed, “No, not yet, please, not yet, not yet—“

* * *

_Rush opens his eyes._

_There is a him, he thinks. There is a him who can open his eyes._

_He is surrounded by darkness, and so it doesn’t seem to matter._

_But still: still, there is a him. There is._

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He watched a mayfly clamber across the ceiling, long-legged and artless as a clumsy ballerina. The room was filled with blue light. He thought that it was dawn. Or, no— it was very late in the evening. A window was open. Air currents interacted, bearing the mayfly aloft.

He shivered.

“Rush?” —A terribly tentative voice.

He was Nicholas Rush. But was he the _same_ Nicholas Rush? Was he the Nicholas Rush that the tentative voice was seeking?

He had woken before. He remembered waking. He had woken, and when he had opened his mouth, the river had come out of it. The river. The Red Road. A fist-sized dent in the wall. Painted turquoise, with a stripe. He had run his hand along the wall, and the stripe had reminded him of the river. The radio had cracked the window. They had been screaming at each other, and not at him. If he opened his mouth again it would come out: an accent you could not render in writing without seeming comical, dull-witted, a drunk and ludicrous caricature. He wouldnae, wouldn’t, _would not_ say it, would not vomit up the river from deep inside of him where it had come to stay.

But he did not know how else to speak, and he was paralysed by the certainty that, no matter his intent, that voice would come out.

He stared mutely at the skinhead girl.

She held a device in her lap that he recognized as a computer.

“I’m trying to make things better,” she said. “Do you remember?”

He remembered being frightened.

He was beginning to be frightened again.

“No,” he whispered. He shut his eyes.

He wanted to go back to the place where he felt safe, where he did not have to make decisions about what he was going to sound like and whether he was or was not Nicholas Rush. He did not know how to get there. It was a process of rewinding. Or unwinding. There had been a moment before everything began to separate itself from itself. A moment before everything _began._ He moved towards it in his mind, making everything still and perfect.

“No—“ the girl said.

Still.

And perfect.

“Rush, you must _stop!_ ”

He tasted blood.

The air around him darkened.

“Rush—!“

* * *

_Rush opens his eyes._

_He is in a place that he finds familiar._

_“I’m here,” he whispers._

_He does not know where “here” is._

_He thinks that it is not anywhere yet, which is what makes it the right place._

_Because he is here, but it is unclear who he is._

_Perhaps he is no one._

_“No; you’re definitely someone,” a voice says._

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

He felt very still and very quiet and very heavy, as though he were pressed down against a bed.

But he was not. He was lying on a couch. It was upholstered in sea-green velour. He turned his head fractionally and watched his fingertips stir against the fibers. His hand was trembling, but he did not find it painful. The texture of the cloth was pleasing and oddly hypnotic.

His head hurt.

“Rush?” someone asked very softly. He had heard that voice before.

“Yes,” he whispered. He felt his brow furrow. For some reason his voice disturbed him.

“It is me. Ginn. Is this acceptable?”

“…Ginn,” he said.

Ginn was a stubble-headed girl in dirty jeans and a bright orange tank top. She wore a fearful expression. She was sitting on the floor beside the couch with her legs crossed. She had, he thought, very extraordinary eyes: large, and a sort of changeable amber colour.

He did not recognise her.

“I knew you,” he said. “Before.”

He knew that there had been a before.

“Yes,” she said. Her face crumpled. “You don’t remember?”

“I—“ He turned his face up to the ceiling and thought. It was night. The room was dark, in the only way that rooms were dark when one lived in a city. Light filtered through the windows. There was a lamp. He watched shadows move over the ceiling: the obverse of headlamps; tree branches. They put him in mind of animals running over the plains. Buffalo, he thought. He did not know where the thought had come from. “Someone stole you,” he said vaguely. He did not know where that thought had come from, either.

Ginn tilted her head, obscuring her expression. “Yes,” she said. “I was abducted by the Lucian Alliance. As were you. I arranged our escape, with the aid of—“ She hesitated. “I arranged our escape. We are safely on Earth now, and in the home of a friend.”

“Miss Selfridge,” Rush said. He frowned. “Was I— Did I wake up before?”

“Yes,” Ginn said. She paused. “I do not know who is Miss Selfridge. Your friend’s name is Chloe Armstrong.”

Rush shook his head. “I don’t remember.” His fingers scraped the sea-green velour in a restless tremour. There was something silver— a scar— on the palm of his hand.

Ginn looked pained. “You rely on mechanical transmitters,” she said.”To treat a— an injury. I have been attempting to ascertain if adjustments to these transmitters will influence your access to memories. You were very—“ She looked down and bit her lip. “You were very badly injured.”

“No,” Rush said. He blinked slowly at her. He was sorting through a mental sludge, not dissimilar to siliceous ooze. It felt riddled with the skeletal remains of the little delicate microorganisms that had once made up the biome him. “ _You_ were. You were bleeding.”

Ginn gestured to a bandage on her upper arm. “As you see, I am much repaired.”

“Are you?” Rush asked. He had an unclear recollection that she had struck him as very much more hurt than that. But he could not attach the recollection to any concrete memory. It was all just— dissolved in the sediment. He felt unspeakably tired. He attempted a smile. “I suppose you are. And you rescued me, did you?”

She dropped her head, pulling her legs in toward her. “I thought that I did.”

“We’re here, aren’t we?” He let an arm drop off the edge of the sofa, and touched the smooth, polished, dark wood of the floor. It was reassuringly solid. It had the faint unevenness of very old houses, as though a lot of history had happened and caused it to shift.

“But—“ Ginn seemed almost tearful. “You would not wake up! And then when you woke you were so extremely frightened. You caused yourself a nosebleed. Before. When you woke before. I believed I could reprogram the transmitters and you would be all—“ She gestured helplessly. “Correct. But you are not correct. Are you?”

Rush touched his philtrum with a faint sense of surprise, as though there might still be blood there. But there wasn’t, when he examined his fingertips. “Correct,” he repeated. “I don’t know. I don’t know how I would know if I were correct.”

There was a quiet knock from somewhere behind the sofa. Rush raised himself up to his elbows with a wince and peered over the furnishing’s sloping back. The Miss Selfridge girl he had recalled, a slender dark-haired figure, was standing in a softly-lit entryway that led to a kitchen. She was holding a half-full water glass.

“Hi,” she whispered. “Sorry. I thought I’d see if you wanted some Advil.”

“He does not want Advil, Chloe Armstrong,” Ginn said with some asperity. “Go away and fetch him a t-shaped shirt.”

“Actually, I _would_ quite like some Advil,” Rush said. He pulled a face. “Or— a craniotomy, if one happens to be on offer.”

The dark-haired girl smiled. “Sorry. We’re strictly a no-trepanation household. It’s a historic building; there are rules.”

“Rules,” Rush said. “Fuck rules.” He accepted the glass of water from her, and held out his hand to receive two burnt-orange pills.

“Wow,” the girl said. “You sound… a lot like yourself.”

“Do I?” Rush swallowed the pills. The water was cool but not cold. For a moment it tasted distractingly of calcium, potassium, and phosphorus, as well as the inimitable fizz of protium atoms. Then he swallowed, and it was water again. “I suppose I wouldn’t know. As I was just saying.”

Ginn looked down. “Recalibrating the transmitters was ineffective. He does not remember.”

“Oh,” the dark-haired girl said. “But, I mean, he hasn’t broken any lightbulbs this time, or blown up the fuse box, or shorted out half of Georgetown, so that’s… you know, an improvement. Right?”

There was a pause.

Rush stared at her, uncomprehending. “Sorry; I haven’t _what?_ ”

The dark-haired girl looked from him to Ginn. “You didn’t tell him,” she said.

Ginn’s mouth was set in a stubborn line. “We have a great amount of material to discuss.”

“I know,” the dark-haired girl said. She bit her lip. “I know you do.”

“Additionally, _you_ are the one who insisted not to upset him,” Ginn said accusingly. She fixed Rush with a gaze that invited him to share her disbelief. “Chloe Armstrong instructed me that only one of us must be present when you woke, and that we must speak softly, so that you did not startle. I opined that _you_ startled _me_ when you beset me with the flat robot, regardless of whether or not you were meaning to, and she asked me was I familiar with fire safety and the cost of electricities, knowing already that I was not.”

Rush tried to comprehend this. He had a limited memory of something electric, like lemon flavour and sparkling gin and smoke, below his skin and in the back of his mouth. There had been noise. He had not understood. He did not understand now. He pressed the glass of water against his forehead and felt energy transfer take place, the particulate vibration of his skin’s atoms slow. It was easier to be himself when all the things he had to be to be himself were not in frantic motion. “I don’t…” he said. “I don’t know what you mean. Did I stick a fork in a socket, or something? I’m afraid I— I really don’t—“

 _Remember_ , he’d been going to say. But he did remember, slightly. He had felt that his body was not limited to his body, that he was unable to keep his fear from spilling out of him. Without ever actually articulating such a message to the dumbstruck world he had asked for shelter. And somehow the walls and circuits and wiring had sort of… _stretched_ a little, so that he would not be alone whilst he was frightened. Or else he had been the one who had stretched, spreading himself out as thin as the smear of ice from a passing comet, into a thousand thousand particulate hiding places.

                               _I am like a slip of comet..._

“I don’t understand,” he whispered. The glass was trembling. He tightened his hand around it. He could see, blurrily, through the moving water, the silver lines of the scar on his hand.

                             _Bridging the slender difference of two stars..._

He had been afraid that someone would poach him. He had been afraid that someone would scramble him. Like he was an egg. He could not immediately determine whether or not this had happened. Was he the same person who had awoken then? He did not really feel that he was. That other person’s panic was distant.

But then— at the moment, everything seemed somewhat distant. The colours were muted. It was all unreal.

With the hand that was not holding the water glass, he touched one of the tiny button-transmitters that he was aware of on the sides of his head. It felt warm; organic. Like it was part of his flesh. “Did you turn me down?” he asked incredulously. He was abruptly conscious of the fact that his voice sounded, to his own ears, slurred. “Did you fucking _turn me down?_ ”

Ginn said quickly, “I can fix it. Only, you were distressed, and you could not remember, and—“

Rush could not hold onto his anger. He could not hold onto any emotion. They ran through his body. Like water through a broken glass, he thought. He was supposed to contain them, but he was failing to do it. He wanted very badly to communicate this idea and its frustrations to the two girls, and to communicate also the experience of being a sentient being caught in the midst of it, but he could not force his thoughts together, and it was obvious that this communication was not going to occur through language, so— this being the case— he threw the water glass at Ginn.

His aim was extremely clumsy, and it sailed over her left shoulder to shatter against a side table bearing a coy little potted fern. Glass and water sprayed in star-like glints across the polished hardwood.

The dark-haired girl’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. “Did you seriously just do that?” she demanded. “What is _wrong_ with you?”

“Clearly nothing that _she_ can’t fix,” Rush bit out. “Why not just ask her to turn the dial a little further?”

The girl glared at him. “We’re trying to help you, you know! You’re behaving like a _child!_ ”

“No. It’s all right,” Ginn said. She had not reacted, except to stare fixedly downwards.

“It is _not_ all right! How _dare_ he? You got hurt trying to save him, and— and that glass was _not_ cheap! It was part of a set of six, and it was _vintage_.”

Rush flung himself down on the couch with his back turned towards them. As an afterthought, he seized a decorative pillow and gripped it tightly to his chest.

He could not _think_ , and his head hurt.

He felt intensely miserable and at the same time sleepy. He felt like a lot of disparate pieces that someone had stumbled across and then sewn up without his say-so. He felt post-surgery and punched full of needle-holes.

He wanted to be electricity again, but he could not remember how to do it. He could not even remember how to be a man. Was he certain that he was a man, and not an electrical current in a man’s body? This sort of displacement, he thought, might explain a significant amount of ineptitude on his part, for which no satisfactory explanation had previously been offered.

Behind him, he could hear Ginn and the dark-haired girl arguing loudly.

He decided that he was not interested in the argument. He was only interested in figuring out how to get the electricity out of his body. He imagined clouds of humming electrons—

_I am like a slip of comet_

—ionised air. He would come along and rip the sky open between these clouds like the reverse of a stitch pulling tight.

_Scarce worth discovery, in some corner seen  
                              Bridging the slender difference of two stars_

He would hum at exactly the right pitch to make energy travel, the conductor of some great murmuration of lightning bugs.

_Come out of space, or suddenly engender'd  
                              By heady elements—_

He was capable of this because he himself knew what it was to be a filament, feverish and luminiferous and burning away your flammable insides.

I am a flash of lightning, he thought, that dreamt it was a man. I’m not human, I'm not, I’m not human, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not—

* * *

_Rush opens his eyes._

_He is in a place that he finds familiar._

_“I’m here,” he whispers._

_A voice says, “I’m pretty sure we’ve been over this.”_

_Rush glares at the owner of the voice, a shadow on the perimeter of a landscape that Rush now sees is dawn-coloured and luminous with tall damp grass. “You’re not supposed to be here,” Rush says accusingly._

_“I’m not?”_

_“No. You’re interfering. I’m trying to sort out the bits that are me from the bits that aren’t.”_

_The other man frowns. “Well,” he says, “I don’t know what to tell you. I didn’t bring myself here, and I don’t know how to go away again.”_

_“Yes, you do,” Rush says crossly. “You must do. You’re making yourself deliberately intolerable.”_

_“You sound different here, you know,” the man says. There’s a hint of a grin in his voice. “More Scottish.”_

_Rush presses his lips together tightly and looks away. “Fuck you,” he says, enunciating the vowels with chilly preciseness._

_There’s a sensation as though the man has touched his shoulder. “Hey, no; I like it,” the man says._

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

The white paper bell of a Scandinavian lamp was glowing softly beside his head.

A quadrilateral of night was visible in his eyeline. He watched as a pair of taillights bled across it in a horizontal streak. He understood that this signified he was on Earth, and that he had not been on Earth previously.

He did not know when _previously_ had been. He knew that it occupied a point on a linear axis, a point that he had transcended. He was travelling in one direction now. He thought that this direction was towards entropy. He could feel the substructure of the universe spinning slowly apart, the gradual and ongoing dissolution of all things. Components that had once touched could not touch any longer. He felt it as an inconsolable sadness underlying every atomic movement, a kind of spectre.

Slowly and after a long span of time had passed, he turned his head away from the window.

The girl in the orange shirt— Ginn?— was asleep on the hardwood floor beside the couch, her head resting against a lavender pillow and her stick-limbed body almost subsumed by an enormous silver sleeping bag.

“Don’t wake her up,” said a quiet voice.

Rush looked. The other girl, the dark-haired girl, was eyeing him with a severe expression from where she was curled in an armchair on the far side of the room.

“Oh, _what?_ ” he said, riled by the look. He might have flipped her the Vs if he hadn’t felt so fucking tired, but he _did_ feel tired; he was right knackered (was he? something about the word choice struck him as disconcerting), and he could not immediately summon a reason why this should be. He did not remember what had happened.

He tried to put together the pieces, without much success. He had been not on Earth. He had coincided with a time that had not occupied a point on a linear axis, but now did. He did not bear any obvious wounds. He was simply tired, and his hands were shaking.

“You threw a glass of water at her,” the dark-haired girl said disapprovingly. Rush could tell already that she was a disapproving sort of person.

“I’m certain I had an excellent reason to do so,” he said. He grimaced at his transformation of the initial vowel in _certain_ from a monophthong to a diphthong, but it was too late for him to flatten it.

“She rescued you from a gang of galactic space criminals who were torturing you,” the girl said, “and she’s covered in burns and knife wounds, so I kind of don’t think you did.”

“The Lucian Alliance,” Rush said, frowning. If pressed, he would not have been able to say precisely what the name meant. He associated it with a shiver, and a sense of unease, and the memory of a boot coming down in the centre of his back.

“Yes, the Lucian Alliance. And she’s been trying to _fix_ you, so—“

“She _turned me down_ ,” Rush realised, this much of the memory coming back to him. His hand went automatically to his forehead, finding the pinprick button of first one transmitter, then the other. “Like a fucking _radio_.”

“You burned up six inches of wiring inside of one of my electrical sockets before you passed out!” the girl shot back. “You set off the smoke alarm. _And_ the security alarm.”

“Yes— well—“ Rush narrowed his eyes. He was not enjoying the experience of partial amnesia. It made hard work of justifying his actions. And he did not want to confess that he was not certain if they _were_ his own actions, or _how_ much they were his own actions, since he was certain that he would sound quite insane if he attributed said actions to a coalition of inanimate objects and his undetermined-number-of-hours-earlier-self, in spite of the fact that he felt somewhat impelled to do so. There had been… He had _been_ the wiring in the walls. Hadn’t he? Burning himself up? Or _it_ had been _him._ He had been made of more pieces than he currently was. More, or different, or in different arrangements. Trying to think about it made his head hurt. He raked his hair back to cover the wince, and boosted himself up to his elbows. “Perhaps your flat shouldn’t have such poor wiring in the first place,” he said. “Have you thought about that? And a _security alarm_ — you look about twelve; what’ve you got that’s worth nicking? Toy dolls? Comic books?”

The dark-haired girl looked stung. “You know what? I was right,” she said. “You _are_ exactly like yourself. You _sound_ like yourself, at least. When I met you at Cheyenne Mountain, you were awful to me there, too. And I tried to _help_ you. I’m _still_ trying to help you. You’re in _my house._ You and this— this— this—“ She gestured at the floor. “—This Lucian Alliance _person_ showed up on my front doorstep, absolutely covered in blood, and trashed my Halloween decorations, and got me involved in military conspiracies, and broke my Roomba, and almost burned my house down, and all I did was give you water and Advil and help her sew her arm up! And I didn’t call Stargate Command, even though I should’ve, because I didn’t want you to get tortured, and now—“

“I see,” Rush cut her off. His mouth had gone tight when she said, _You sound like yourself._ He did not think that he sounded like himself. “Congratulations; you’ve succeeded at meeting the bare minimum standards of human decency.”

“Um, those are _not_ the bare minimum standards of human decency!” the girl said, her voice rising in a ferocious hush. “What _planet_ are you from?”

“Earth,” Rush said. “I assume. I seem to recall there being other options.” This was misleading. He knew where he was from. He had a clear memory of balancing on a warped board over the lake of rainwater that had collected in the tenement courtyard, black with oil and jagged with bricks. It was his earliest memory, and it was unmistakably Glasgow. The council had come in, condemned the building, and moved the lot of them to a high rise not long after that. But still he remembered himself as a boy, trying to walk the narrow bridge over the water. He had sensed that there was a right way to do it, a way that did not end in skinned knees, but he had not yet discovered the trick. He had shoved his smudgy spectacles up his face with a small hand, determined. He had paused, inched forward, inched, paused. He did not remember whether he had reached the courtyard, in the end.

“You could at least be nice to _her_ ,” the girl said, nodding her head towards the pillowy Arctic sleeping bag that, somewhere within its depths, held Ginn. “She cares about you. It doesn’t help anybody for you to be sarcastic and so— so— so— _unpleasant_.”

Rush picked his way delicately into an upright position. He felt tremendously hungover, and he was trying to understand why he was wearing a large black military jacket that seemed to be several sizes too large. It had no patches or nametape on it. He fingered the frayed edges where the name had been ripped off. “My congratulations were sincere,” he said. “The impression I’m receiving is that under ordinary circumstances I find the bare minimum standards of human decency to be wearisome at best. So— you know—“ He glanced up for long enough to communicate condescension. “Well done, you. Et cetera. However, it’s quite clear to me that my presence here is no longer desirable, and I’d hate to inadvertently summon forth any supererogatory efforts on your part, so perhaps you could simply hand over the computer that controls whatever—“ he waved a vague hand in the vicinity of his head— “ _this_ is, and I’ll be on my way. Shall I?”

He had been cold, and someone had given him the jacket. A man with very dark and difficult-to-measure eyes.

He did not remember the man’s name.

He wished that the nametape were still affixed to the jacket.

“Nice try,” the girl said. Now _she_ was communicating condescension, which he did not think was appropriate. “But I bet you don’t even know where you are, or who I am.”

“I’m on Earth,” Rush said guardedly. “Obviously I’m on Earth.” He was approximately ninety-five percent certain that he was on Earth.

“—Which is helpful,” the girl said. “If you’re travelling via stargate.”

“I do travel via stargate,” he said. He could remember the wheel turning, like a lock in search of its combination. “And—“ He searched his memory. “You know. Spaceship, and so forth.” The girl didn’t appear impressed, so he glanced quickly round. “At any rate, we’re in the United States,” he hazarded a guess, eyeing an electrical socket.

“That’s practically a continent.”

“That’s quite an imperialist position.”

“Explain _why_ it’s an imperialist position,” the girl challenged him.

Rush pushed himself to his feet, with a moderate degree of success, and stood staring at his bare feet, contemplating the location of his shoes. He was opting to ignore the girl, whose position had certainly, certainly been imperialist, though the reasons for this remained a bit vague to him. Something about linguistic oppression, he thought, which was tied into a flurry of opinions regarding Scottish Gaelic and the status of “Scots” as a language. The tendency to discount the ontological weight of sparsely- or un-inhabited territory. He was not quite sure how these thoughts were meant to be fitted together. He had all the pieces of the puzzle, but no map.

“Where are my shoes?” he said.

“My guess would be that they’re on another planet, somewhere inside a Lucian Alliance prison base,” the girl said. “So— probably between twelve and thirty light-years away from Earth.”

“Ah.” Rush crossed his arms across his chest, clenching his hands into fists to hid the fact that they were shaking.

“If not, then they’re probably in Colorado.” The girl paused. “We’re in Washington, DC. Do you know who I am?”

Rush avoided her gaze. He said nothing.

“I’m Chloe Armstrong,” the girl said.“We’ve actually only ever met once. I mean, if you don’t count the two times before this you woke up and met me and forgot who I was. It’s been kind of a weird day.”

“I fail to see how it benefits me to know who you are,” Rush said. He fought the urge to steady himself against the sofa. “I won’t be staying. I only need the computer. Footwear can be— improvised.”

“It’s October,” Chloe said. “It’s pretty cold out there.”

“I know that. Obviously. Obviously I know that.”

“You’ve been gone for almost a month, according to Ginn.”

Once more, Rush said nothing. He thought that she was expecting him to be startled, but he had lost his capacity to be startled. And he had no sense of how long it had been since the last time that it had been… something. Had it been October, that something? He remembered wet leaves stuck to the dark ground, a pale golden tint to the moon overhead, almost exactly the colour of the Sheldonian’s facade and its stone emperors. So: a Clipsham limestone moon. He remembered tasting dust on his tongue, and gazing up past twisted tree branches. He did not know what kind of a tree the tree had been. He did not even know _where_ it had been. He assumed that it had been in Colorado.

“Colorado,” he said experimentally, to feel how the word tasted, and to see if it triggered any memories in him. It did, but these memories were without any real structure. Mountains, a gunshot, motorway services, the Dying Gaul, a ringing in his ears. He was missing something, he felt. Something important.

“Yes,” Chloe said. “Colorado. That’s where you live. Where you were living.”

He did not remember living in Colorado. Did he?

He wasn’t certain.

“Colorado,” he murmured again: to himself, almost. “There used to be so many buffalo in a single herd that... that a man might travel for more than six days through it without stopping and still not manage to emerge.” He did not know where the fact had come from. He felt as though he had always known it. For a moment he looked down at his hand, feeling the warm ghost of an animal’s breath. “But not anymore,” he said. “Not anymore.”

“No,” Chloe said, sounding uncertain. “Not anymore.”

All at once, Rush was unutterably weary. He rubbed his hand over his forehead. “What happened?” he whispered.

Chloe asked, “To the buffalo, or to you?”

Rush had no answer. He shook his head.

After a moment, he dropped back onto the sofa, pulling his bare feet up onto the sea-foam cushion in front of him. “These clothes are filthy,” he said abruptly. “I’m surprised you let me on the furniture. You seem the type not to.”

“I was going to lend you a t-shirt. And some pyjama pants,” Chloe said. She pushed her dark hair behind one ear, which smacked of a nervous gesture. “Just until I have a chance to go shopping. I can, um, get them for you? If you want?”

Rush shrugged. He had fixed his gaze on a dark spot on the hardwood floor, about ten centimetres from Ginn’s foot. When a minute or so had passed, he gave a jerky nod.

“Okay,” Chloe said. She still seemed unsure. She did not immediately move to stand. “Maybe after that I can fill you in on who you are and how you, you know. Got here.”

With a forced air of bored indifference, Rush said, “If you must, I suppose.”

“You don’t have to sound so excited.”

“There’s a certain degree of liberation in self-death. In not knowing who one is, beyond the most basic facts.” Rush was continuing to study the spot on the hardwood floor. He thought it might be varnish, or else a very dark knot in the wood. “Don’t you think so?”

“ _You_ didn’t,” Chloe said. “When you were awake before. You were scared of forgetting.”

“If that was me,” Rush said. “If _I_ was _him_.”

A small crease appeared between Chloe’s delicately shaped eyebrows. “I don’t get it.”

“How many boards do you have to replace in a boat before it isn’t the same boat any longer?”

“Um—“ The crease grew by perhaps an inch. “I mean, I think there was a case about that in the news on the Bay a couple of years ago? A girl died on a guy’s boat, and he tried to argue that the boat wasn’t actually still the same one named in the title, so he had no legal responsibility for what happened on it. I’m pretty sure the court said that seventy-five percent was a reasonable assumption. So: legally, seventy-five percent, I guess. I’d have to double-check the numbers.”

Rush produced a soft, startled huff of laughter, surprising himself. He dropped his head against the sofa’s high back. “That is,” he said, “in its own way, an excellent answer. Legally, seventy-five percent.”

“But you’re not a boat,” Chloe said. The crease in her brow had not vanished.

“No,” Rush said. He closed his eyes. The faint glow emitted by the nearby lamp painted his world in long-wavelength radiation, which was restful. “I’m not a boat. I don’t know what I am.”

Chloe didn’t say anything. After a while she stood. Rush did not open his eyes, but he was aware of the way that she waited for light refracted from his body to reach the photosensitive neurons in her pale, almost lace-agate eyes. What sense was she making of that light? What interpretive schemata was she utilising? What frameworks was she projecting onto him? He wanted to see himself as she saw him, because he could not see himself, and he seemed to lack any intuitive knowledge of his ontological form.

Unconsciously, he brought a hand up and traced his jawline, as though trying to learn it.

Chloe turned from him at last, towards the white stairway. “I’ll go get you those clothes,” she said.

* * *

_Rush opens his eyes._

_He is in a place he finds familiar._

_It has taken shape around him. It is very soft and very quiet. Morning has not yet broken. In fact, nothing has broken. Not yet. Not here._

_He passes his hand over the billowing tops of the grasses, observing how the wind rolls across them like a wave on the sea. The grass goes to the horizon, trammelled only by the pacifistic jaws of buffalo, because no one has cut it. There is no one here to cut it. No one has yet cut their way into the universe, like they will someday cut their way out again._

_“I have._ I’m _here,” the other man points out. And he is. Suddenly, Rush can see him: standing in the rippling field of grass. Rush doesn’t know who he is. He’s nobody: just a badly-shaven man with a mop of curls._

_Rush says, frowning, “But I don’t know who you are.”_

_The other man says, “I don’t know who I am either.”_

_“I’m sure you think that’s terribly philosophical.”_

_“Not really. I guess it is what it is.”_

_“I find that almost nothing is what it is,” Rush says. “Archimedes said,_ Give me a place to stand upon, and I will move the Earth, _but he overlooked the fact that the Earth is already in motion. Or, if one interprets the remark broadly, that the entirety of the universe is.”_

_“So he didn’t need to move it,” the other man says, nodding wisely._

_Rush frowns again. “No. You misunderstand me profoundly, which I suppose is no more than I should’ve expected. He just— needed to find a more subtle way of going about it. There is no solid ground to stand upon. We are all of us floating in space.”_

_“Oh,” the other man says. He pauses. “Why would you expect me to misunderstand you, if you don’t know who I am?”_

_Rush finds this an immensely irritating question, because he doesn’t know the answer to it. “Perhaps I could see right away that you were a person who profoundly misunderstands things,” he says icily._

_“That doesn’t really seem very likely.”_

_“You’re being tiresome.”_

_The other man laughs. “Why, because I’m asking you things?”_

_“No. Fuck off.”_

_“Naw,” the man says amiably. “I think I’ll keep asking you things.”_

_“No.”_

_“Yup.”_

_“Unacceptable.”_

_The man scratches his head. “Say, when does the sun come up around here? You know where we could get a decent cup of coffee?”_

_“I'm not getting coffee with you," Rush protests. "I fucking despise you."_

_“Pretty sure you don’t.”_

_“I’m absolutely certain that I do.”_

_The man squints at him. “Does that mean you know who I am, then?”_

_Rush takes a closer look at him. “You’re—“ he says— and stops, suddenly uncertain._

_The man is tired-faced and somehow blustery, like he’s just gotten hit with a cold shock of wind and it’s brought him out of himself, pinched his cheeks and brightened his sea-coloured eyes. He waits patiently for Rush’s pronouncement. “Well?” he prompts at last. “Go on; tell me. I’m curious.”_

_But Rush is afraid, suddenly— afraid that by speaking the identification into being, he will be speaking something_ out _of being; that when he opens his mouth he will tear this moment apart. The sun will rise and the buffalo will recede into the distance. The grass will wither and be cut. The sky will fill with stars, each one a reminder of light traveling from away from objects that are dying, that are dead. He doesn’t want that to happen. He isn’t ready._

_He stares at the man, frozen with indecision._

_“C’mon, hotshot,” the man says, eyeing him with intolerable gentleness. “The Earth’s moving already. There’s no need to reinvent the lever, here.”_

* * *

Rush opened his eyes.

Sunlight was spilling across an ivory ceiling.

He was lying upon a sea-green sofa, covered in a plaid Harvard University throw blanket. His mouth tasted sour. His head hurt. Upon further inspection, he he appeared to be wearing a t-shirt advertising the Saint Gertrude Gators, which bore the image of a implausibly enthusiastic alligator in a baseball cap carrying a lacrosse stick. This, he felt, was almost certainly beneath his dignity, but it was not immediately clear to him what he ought to do about it. He might have taken the shirt off, but he did not have another, and at any rate he vaguely recalled an expression on the girl’s— Chloe’s— face that had suggested any rejection of said garment would be read as an offense.

Additionally— he found when he located his glasses and settled them on his nose, squinting— Ginn was watching him from across the room.

Rush pushed himself to his elbows and didn’t say anything. He raked his hair back.

“Is it possible for me to get any more of that Advil?” he asked eventually. His voice was exhausted and very rough.

“Yes,” Ginn said in subdued voice. “Chloe Armstrong is sleeping; however, she left a jar. I cannot open it. But perhaps you can.”

She unfolded herself from the armchair where she had been sitting and approached him, a small white bottle in her hand. She was still wearing the bright orange shirt he had previously noticed. He remembered that he had noticed it, although remembering came haltingly and with a sensation very much like pressing a finger to a bruise.

“Thanks,” Rush said, taking the bottle from her and shifting himself upright. His gaze flickered across her bandaged arm and the edges of further bandages that stretched beneath the shirt. He dry-swallowed two of the Advil. “What the fuck happened to you, then?”

Ginn retreated to the armchair. “I was injured,” she said. “How do you feel?”

Rush looked down. He pressed his lips together. “I remember your name,” he said. “If that’s what you mean.”

Ginn looked down. Her eyes were very large and luminous in her pale, thin face. “I attempted to more satisfactorily balance your transmitters while you were sleeping. I will continue to adjust the levels, with your assistance. If that is all right.”

Rush shrugged, tight and one-shouldered.

There was a brief silence.

“Chloe Armstrong advised me…” Ginn began. Her arms were wrapped around her knees. She locked her hands. “—That you remember some things and not others.”

“Yes,” Rush said.

“Oh,” Ginn said.

“I remember that you had hair,” Rush said. “It was red.” He hadn’t looked up from where his fingers traced the shape of the pill bottle. He could see her in his peripheral vision, a soft-edged, underwater-looking figure. “As to your question: physically, I feel—“ But he could not find his way through the remainder of the statement. “Improved,” he said at last. “I appreciate your attentiveness. I… realize now that I may have been somewhat intemperate in my previous behavior.”

“No,” Ginn said. “I understand.” Her voice was flat, but somewhat sad. She had hunched her shoulders.

“I’m reliably informed that you may have brought off a rather daring rescue, at great cost to yourself.”

Ginn’s shoulders hunched further. It was the motion of someone who was in the habit of mobilizing long hair to obscure their expression, but in the absence of such hair, she was nakedly unhappy. “It was my fault,” she said. “They used me as the lure. To pierce your lip, and make you real-in. They made me hurt you with the transmitters, and then I did so to my own gain, so that you would have the superpower to take me free from the Alliance. I rescued myself. Not you. _Myself._ I’m so sorry; I’m so, so sorry.” She raised her face to him, bleak with misery. “I didn’t mean to make you forget!”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Rush said. He was surprised that she would be so much more distressed than he was. He didn’t feel any particular sense of distress— only an unsteadiness that seemed to permeate his being. Chloe had said that he had been distressed before, but he did not know why. Or, no— she had said that he had been scared. But surely he did not get scared. He felt compelled to clarify this to himself, and therefore it must be axiom. “My head hurts,” he said, “but nothing else does. I’m a bit cold, I suppose.”

Ginn rose at once. “You have a jacket. Colonel Telford gave it to you. Here.”

The black jacket was lying, neatly-folded, on a second armchair. Rush accepted it from Ginn and studied it, touching the soft frayed threads that searched for their patches. His hands remembered the texture. He had done this before. “David,” he said.

“Yes.” Ginn hesitated. “He is safe, I think. He felt he could not return to Earth, but he wished for you to have your freedom. I don’t know if you recall that he cared for you. I am not sure how to make him, in the end.”

Rush pulled the jacket over his shoulders. It was warm and heavy. He felt— he did not know what he felt towards Telford. Perhaps he did not remember enough to feel anything at all. But, no, there was a feeling, the hurt that he’d thought was missing: a dull ache, a sense of something forcibly removed, as though someone had carved off a bit of him. A finger-joint, or a whole finger. The Iroquois had used sharpened clamshells. To lop off the fingers of captives, knuckle by knuckle. That was a piece of information that he knew, a fact. He could discourse upon the war-practices of the East Coast Indians, but he could not describe his affective attitude towards a man who had, he thought, probably saved him, though it would not have been possible for Rush to articulate in what sense.

He was of two minds how to respond to this centrifugation of the self, which seemed either appropriate or ironic.

What a relief, after all, in theory; what a fucking relief to feel nothing, to say with perfect honesty, _I don’t feel._ But in practice it did not seem to work that way. The not-feeling left an imprint, a negative image of what it was he did not feel. It seemed that, either way, he was fucked. Either way, he was subjected to a sort of transformation out of his control.

He stared down at the cuffs of the jacket, which fell over his hands. “I see,” he said to Ginn, to stop her from seeing what he was thinking, or that he was thinking.

“I accompanied you to Earth,” Ginn said. “I was worried because you were…” She stopped, and looked hunted. She turned away. “You were sick,” she said in a low voice.

“A vegetable, you mean?” Rush’s mouth twisted. “Or mad? Miss Armstrong related parts of this story to me.”

“I don’t know what this means, a vegetable.”

“Brain-damaged,” Rush said, with a touch of bitterness. “It means that they damaged my fucking brain with— whatever the fuck they were doing.”

He did not know how to feel about this, either. It seemed to have happened to someone else: another Rush, only distantly related. Perhaps four or five permutations away from him.

“No,” Ginn whispered. “You were not a— a— _vegetable_.” She shook her head. She didn’t speak for a moment, though she did not seem to have completed what she was trying to say.

After a while, without any accompanying explanation, she came to sit gingerly at the very edge of the sofa. Rush thought that perhaps she didn’t want to look at him. She braced her elbows on her knees and knotted her hands together, gazing out across the meticulous and expensively decorated room. There was blood on the bandage taped to her arm, just a little. It looked like red ink that had leaked across a thick piece of paper.

“You were not yourself,” Ginn said at last.

“No,” Rush said.

“Are you—“ She took a breath. She didn’t look at him. “Are you yourself now? —Do you think?”

Rush pressed his lips together. He did not wish to answer this question. “No,” he said.

Ginn nodded. Her shoulders sagged, but her expression didn’t change.

Rush reached out rather tentatively and touched her shoulder: the freckled skin between the bandage and the bright orange sleeve-strap. It was a gesture that felt alien to him. If she wished him to be himself, he suspected that this was not the correct procedure. However, no other procedure immediately presented itself for implementation. And the moment his hand came to rest upon her, she folded against him, crumpling like a slip of paper.

Unsure what to do, he reached an awkward arm around her and held her: just there, a limp weight against his chest. He did not think she was crying, but he could feel her hot, uneven breath against his suprasternal notch.

“I will make you yourself again,” she said in a ragged voice. “It must be possible. It _must_ be.”

Rush settled his chin a little skittishly atop her head. He did not say anything. He was contemplating the peculiarity of being promised one’s own existence. If he was not himself— not yet— then who was he? An in-between state, he thought. A liminality. An instant, like the others: the unclear iterations of himself whom he had been for— he did not know how long. A few moments, perhaps. They had lived such brief lives, like mayflies. He pictured them batting against the now-quiescent lamp, searching with bare feet and blind fingertips for some clarifying form of radiation. He could remember, very unclearly, being them. It was a troubling memory to have, because he was fairly certain that he was not them any longer. So: what did that make him?

He could remember spilling through his own fingers. He could remember being electric, like the lamp.

He eyed the brittle white lantern-paper that wrapped the framework of its bell. Carefully, where Ginn would not see it, he lifted a single finger towards it. Particles surged clumsily; his skin itched with excess current. He could see the positions of all things in the air.

The filament of the lamp stuttered, white-hot, for a moment.

Rush very quickly closed his fist. He felt nervous and very queasy. The effort left aftershadows in his vision, tracks of the quantum world that he could not easily put away.

“Like the dinosaurs,” Ginn whispered. “In _Jurassic Park._ They came back, though they had been dead for many millions of years. Out of the amber.”

“Yes,” Rush said. He stared at the lamp. “They did.”


	45. Fugue, Pt. 3: B

The first question that Chloe doesn’t ask is: How long are you staying?

It’s something that she kind of needs to know, and not just because she keeps a meticulous Excel spreadsheet of all her anticipated monthly expenses, and those are going to be really different if she’s buying groceries for three people than they are if she’s buying groceries for one, especially since Ginn eats a lot; like, a _lot,_ as Chloe had discovered when she opened the pantry door on the third morning after Ginn and Dr. Rush’s arrival and found three cleaned-out boxes of Back to Nature Fudge Mint Cookies and about half a cup of parmesan garlic Popchips left at the bottom of a mostly-empty bag. Not just because of that, but because Chloe — you know— has a _life_ to get back to. A whole life ahead of her, a real life to plan.

So she should ask how long they’re staying. Because they can’t stay here forever. Obviously. So it’d be totally reasonable and not at all impolite to say something like, Listen, I want to help you guys, but I have a life to move forward with, a life that I need to get back to, and this isn’t part of it, so you need to go somewhere else, you need to work out a solution.

And it’s true, that this isn’t part of her life. It’s just a weird little interlude, like the rest of this past month has been, a quick detour, a phase she’s going through before she figures out what the next step is. And then, when she moves onto that step, it’ll be like the gap that separates neurons, just a place that she had to gather up her energy to jump.

But she _doesn’t_ ask. Not that morning when she opens the pantry door and finds the cookie boxes. Not that night, when she has to pad downstairs three times in her eiderdown-duck-shaped slippers to ask Ginn to please, please, please turn the TV off, since each time Ginn gives her a flat, cool, disinterested look and hits the mute button, only for a _Law & Order_ marathon to be audible again by the time Chloe gets back to her bedroom. (Chloe and Ginn haven’t really managed to get off on the right foot— even leaving aside the whole knife-to-the-throat thing, or how mad Ginn had been every time Chloe made a totally simple, practical suggestion about how to stop Dr. Rush from accidentally setting stuff on fire, or really how mad Ginn had been, for some reason, every time Chloe even opened her mouth. Even leaving aside all of that. Ginn had hated all the clothes that Chloe brought back from Target, especially the sneakers, which had been a pair of black Converse high-tops, basically the least offensive shoes in the world, and since then it’s kind of seemed like she’s adopted Dr. Rush’s policy of just not bothering with shoes at all. Or, okay, Dr. Rush’s policy is more like “fuck shoes.” Not even _more like_ ; that’s actually what he’d said, the second time he realized that his shoes were probably floating around somewhere in the depths of space.) She doesn’t even ask the next morning, when she reaches the kitchen and finds Dr. Rush in the process of breaking her coffeemaker while Ginn sits on the counter, reading articles about his life to him.

“You obtained your credential at this locale Oxford,” Ginn says, staring at her laptop. “It is famous. People of your caste are not meant to attend.”

“Fuck,” Dr. Rush says to the coffee machine, which is gurgling dolefully. “Do what I tell you, you bastard.”

“You have been employed by many universities throughout the American Empire,” Ginn says. “Look: this one is in Ithaca, the kingdom that Odysseus ruled.”

Dr. Rush frowns. “That doesn’t sound right,” he says.

“Well,” Ginn says stoutly, “it is. It _is_ right. You were awarded a piece of farmland for your work of polynomial time and algorithms.”

Chloe covers her mouth with her hand and doesn’t say anything. She thinks that she might be trying not to laugh, though what she feels is more complicated than an ordinary laughing-feeling, and she doesn’t know what to think about that. Really, so many of her problems these days are problems of metacognition. Something happens, and she feels a certain way, but then she doesn’t know what to do with that feeling. She’s standing in front of a shelving unit, holding all of these feelings that need shelving, but she hasn’t figured out an organizational system that will tell her where they’re supposed to go.

Dr. Rush says, sounding annoyed, “If I was awarded a piece of farmland, why the fuck are we _here_ , then? There isn’t even a decent coffeemaker, for fuck’s sake.”

The coffeemaker gives a kind of exhausted croak and spits a mouthful of gritty, pale-brown liquid all over the counter.

“Um,” Chloe says.

Their gazes swing in accusing unison towards her, leaving her momentarily terrified and transfixed. Even though they have different-colored eyes, Ginn’s as amber as a piece of jewelry and Rush’s startlingly dark in his thin pale face, both of them always seem to manage the same quality of piercing hauteur. It makes Chloe feel extremely humble, until she remembers that it’s _her house_ they’re staying in.

It’s _her house_ they’re staying in! They’re freeloaders! Spacefaring freeloaders! They have to leave any time she asks!

But she doesn’t ask.

And she doesn’t know why.

* * *

The second question Chloe doesn’t ask is: What happened?

In the specific, not the general sense. She knows the outline— even gets some of the details, here and there, as those first few days become a week. But there are things she doesn’t know. Sometimes it hits her. Like: when she thinks Ginn might have finally gone to sleep, she creeps downstairs to actually turn the TV off, since Ginn always falls sleep with it on— on, but with the volume low enough that Chloe’s never sure if Ginn really pays attention to the dialogue, or how much of it she even understands; her English is good, _really_ good, for someone who came to Earth for the first time two months ago, but not perfect, which is maybe why the two of them keep irritating each other, Chloe thinks; maybe when you get down to it, it’s actually just a language problem—and she sees Ginn sleeping: hunched up into a kind of sleeping-bag boulder, exposing only a little bare crescent of head.

There are scars on her head, small ones, nicks and scrapes. Whoever had cut her hair hadn’t done a good job. Chloe’s pretty sure that Ginn hadn’t consented to the cutting. That gives her a weird feeling in the center of her stomach. She doesn’t know what it does to a person to be held down and have their head shaved. She doesn’t know how to react to it. It’s so completely outside the rules of what happens to people in the kind of life she’s learned to live that it makes her panicky, almost. Like— if that rule’s no good, then what about the others? The most basic ones, about the kind of thoughts you have, about the _you_ those thoughts assemble, the you-making principles of cause and effect? How can she even _talk_ to this person who that happened to? It’s a different language problem: how do you know that someone else means what you mean when they use the right words, but all their points of reference— everything in their whole world— are so absolutely strange to you?

She doesn’t think that she means what Ginn means, even though they haven’t had any conversations that go very far beyond “fuck shoes.”

Maybe that’s why she doesn’t ask. She wants to hang on to the _doesn’t think_ part, to the sliver of a chance that there could still be something they understand about each other.

And as for Dr. Rush— well, most of the time he seems almost normal, or as normal as you’d expect. Because he doesn’t remember, Chloe tells herself wisely. Then, all of a sudden, he’ll say or do something peculiar, and Chloe’ll be _aware_ of him. Like a broken hammer, she thinks, remembering a college lecture on Heidegger. She hadn’t really understood the lecture. _Ready-to-hand,_ she’d written doubtfully, _vs. unreadiness-to-hand. Tool vs. broken tool._ She thinks she gets it a little more now. Like: that second night, when she was cooking spaghetti in the kitchen, listening to him trash a Malcolm Gladwell book that she’d given him to keep him occupied while Ginn was sleeping, and he’d halted mid-tirade, halfway through a word.

She’d pushed her hair back and looked over her shoulder to see him touching his lips. He’d looked confused.

“Nobody would what?” Chloe had asked. Nobody. That was what he’d been saying.

“Naebdy,” Dr. Rush had said. He’d grimaced. “Naebdy,” he’d repeated. “Naebdy. Nae-bo-dy. Nae. Nae. Naebody. Nae. No. No. No. Nae. No-body. No body. Nobody. No.”

Chloe had stood there stupidly, the stick of the wooden pasta-stirrer still in her clenched fist. She hadn’t known what to say. The lights in the kitchen had flickered a little, or at least she’d thought so, but she wasn’t sure if she was imagining it. She’d been abruptly conscious of Dr. Rush as a person you couldn’t trust to behave like a person, a person who could do things a person couldn’t do, and who couldn’t do all the things that a person did.

“Nobody,” Dr. Rush had said. “No-body.” He’d stared at the kitchen counter, his eyes empty, the tips of his fingers still pressed to his lips. After a long pause, he’d raised his gaze slowly to her. “Is that what I’m meant to sound like?” he’d asked her, almost conversationally.

“I… don’t know,” Chloe had said, uncertain.

“You must know, though. Surely.”

“I don’t really know you.”

“But you met him. Me. Him.”

Chloe had watched his shoulders hunch as he glanced quickly away. “I guess,” she’d said, not sure if that was the right answer. “I met _you._ ”

“Do you suppose it’s possible to remember being someone else?” he’d asked. He had still been looking away from her, staring at the wall. “Something else. Being— not. Not being.”

Chloe had turned away from him, pretending that she needed to stir the spaghetti. Even though he hadn’t met her eyes, she’d still felt like she couldn’t bear to look at him. “I don’t know,” she said, keeping her voice mild and even. “ But I think that you’re allowed to sound however you want.” It had seemed, even to her, like a dumb thing to say, a pacification. “You’ll get better,” she’d said, trying again.

“Yes,” Dr. Rush had said hollowly. “Better.”

“It’s still early days.”

His hand had curled into a fist on which he balanced his chin, looking hunted. “Do things get better as they get later?” he’d asked. “I suppose I’d always thought the opposite. But then, my sense of time is…” He’d made a vague gesture.

Chloe had seen an equally vague expression creep over his face. He wasn’t there anymore; he’d gone wherever he went when he had these episodes of strangeness. Maybe nobody was there. Naebdy, like he’d said. But she’d felt like whatever was there was _more_ there, or she was more alive to its presence. It was a presence with so much power that it warped the whole geography of the house. Everything seemed rearranged: the white oak kitchen table and its matching set of round-backed chairs; the oven, the microwave, the sticky unplugged coffeemaker. All of it was slightly further apart than it had been, or slightly nearer, or askew. It was disorienting. She’d felt that she also had to change how she moved through the kitchen. She’d been conscious of shifting her balance a little, feeling out the ground underneath each foot.

Heidegger says that a broken tool shows us a different kind of being. You don’t think about the hammer until it doesn’t do what you assume it’s made for. Then, when it breaks, you’re suddenly aware that all along it might have been possible for it to do something else. It could always have not-hammered just as easily as it hammered. It’s not a hammer. On some level, it’s just a piece of metal and wood. It might not even be that. It might just be… something. It might be something that hasn’t decided what it’s going to be next.

But she doesn’t know how to have a conversation with _something._ So she needs for Dr. Rush to be a person. She knows how to talk to a person. Interpersonal Communication is her third-highest Multiple Intelligence score.

“I think the spaghetti’s ready,” she’d said with forced brightness, that night in the kitchen. “Maybe you should go wake Ginn up and get her to set the table. There are napkins under the silverware drawer.”

Dr. Rush had stared at her for a long moment, looking troubled. “…Napkins,” he’d whispered.

“Yes,” Chloe had said uncertainly. “Napkins.”

She’d watched him slowly bring a hand up to rake it through his hair. There’d been something desolate in the motion. The hand stayed there, the base of it pressed hard against his forehead. He’d looked like a statue, like someone had been chipping bits off him.

 _What happened?_ Chloe had wanted to ask.

* * *

The third question that Chloe doesn’t ask is: Don’t you want somebody else’s help?

All right, she kind of does ask, insofar as she nags at Ginn about a doctor, even after she sees that the burns on her chest are starting to heal. She insists that Ginn let her keep putting antibiotic ointment on them, which is maybe a little weird, since it means that Ginn has to keep taking her shirt off in front of Chloe, whom she clearly despises. Chloe isn’t sure she likes Ginn all that much, either, but she doesn’t, you know, want her to _die._ So she adopts a kind of friendly, formal, professional demeanor. It’s not like Ginn really seems to care about not having her shirt on; she’s usually staring at the television, totally ignoring Chloe.

“These are starting to look better,” Chloe says, a couple of days into the visit-that-isn’t-really-a-visit-because-she-doesn’t-know-when-it’s-going-to-end. She inspects the edge of a burn where it skirts Ginn’s collarbone. “I guess you’re not going to get blood poisoning and die.”

Ginn’s mouth tightens. She’s watching _General Hospital._ “I am not so weak as a Tau’ri person.”

“You know that biologically we’re the same species, right?”

“No.”

“A few thousand years is _not_ long enough for divergent evolution to happen,” Chloe says, “and according to Stargate Command, the whole human population of the galaxy comes from Earth.”

Ginn makes a disgusted sound. “Stargate Command.”

“Yeah,” Chloe says. “I know. But even you admit that they _did_ save your life in the first place.”

Ginn’s mouth turns down. “No. Rush.”

Chloe rolls her eyes. She sits back up from where she’d been starting to dab ointment on Ginn’s chest with a Q-Tip. “Okay, you’re really going to have to stop the whole laconic badass thing, because I don’t know whether you’re trying to say Rush saved your life, or Stargate Command saved _Rush’s_ life.”

Ginn looks sullen. “I don’t know what is laconic.”

“I’m going to give you an English dictionary, and it’s going to mean you have to get a whole new set of comebacks.” Chloe goes back to her first-aid ministrations. “Laconic means you only give one-word responses. And you clench your jaw a lot. Just like you’re doing.”

Ginn visibly unclenches her jaw. She stares resentfully at the carpet. “I am not laconic. I’m only a badass. This term I know.”

Chloe resists the temptation to roll her eyes again. Instead, she focuses on not accidentally letting her knuckles make contact with the underside of Ginn’s right breast, a soft shallow curve of flesh that’s too close to the burn scars for Chloe to afford not to be careful. She had touched Ginn there the second time she tried to do this, and it had been… strange. Just awkward. You were allowed to touch people where they were hurt, but not where they weren’t, not really, and screwing up and touching Ginn on one of the unburned parts of her body had made Chloe feel like she’d scraped off her own skin, or like she’d pressed the back of her hand against something that wasn’t supposed to have been electric but turned out to be, with no warning label. She’d pulled her whole arm back hastily and almost knocked a can of Diet Coke over, discombobulated and unable to coordinate her limbs.

“I mean,” she says now, trying to stop herself from flushing and trying, at the same time, to find a safe place for her eyes, “you’ve got two guns and a knife, and you killed a guy and stole his leather jacket, so you’re just a badass by default. It doesn’t even count. It’s not even really a good thing.”

Ginn sets her jaw again. “Yes. It is a good thing.”

“Being _safe_ is a good thing.”

Now Ginn is the one who rolls her eyes. “If you wish to be _safe_ , then Stargate Command has possibly a cell to lend you.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” Chloe says, feeling more than a little defensive. “You know, I _work_ with Stargate Command. I mean, I did. And I’m going to again; I want to. I’m just waiting to hear about a job.”

Somehow, even though she’s taping a piece of gauze over Ginn’s sternum, Chloe can feel the look that Ginn is shooting her: somewhere between incredulity and unparalleled scorn. Ginn says, “You are one of these people, a bystander. You have a bystander effect. Jackson warned me of this phenomenon.”

“ _No,_ ” Chloe says, stung. “I’m not a _bystander!_ ”

Ginn settles herself back smugly against the couch. “Yes,” she says.

“It’s not that I don’t care; it’s that I don’t think Stargate Command is as bad as you keep saying. Sure, they make some bad calls, but that’s why we have the International Oversight Advisory. And there are lots of good people who work there, too.”

“Like Young,” Ginn says contemptuously. “Yes. I thought so. But time has proved my presumptioning wrong.”

Chloe jabs at the end of the tape. “You don’t even know that’s true, that Young wants to— that he would do something like that. You’re just taking Colonel Telford’s word for it. Because it’s not like _he_ worked for Stargate Command.”

She sets the tape down. As soon as she does, Ginn closes her arms over her body, as hard and unfriendly as armor. “And now _you_ will work for Stargate Command,” Ginn says. Her face is frozen. “And you too perhaps will arrange for my torture. You will shoot Rush with the chemicals. It is possible. This behavior, the Stargate mountain makes possible. It makes _ordinary_. I know the men of Stargate, and they are ordinary men. But what will _you_ hold in yourself, so that when a slave girl comes to you at night with news of another possible, you will take this up, although you know that you may die?”

Chloe doesn’t know what to say to that. Because, of course, she can’t imagine any of that stuff happening. Not to her. “I wouldn’t do that,” she says, but her voice isn’t convincing. She just sounds like a little child: stupid, weak, and spoiled.

“Of course you would not,” Ginn says, condescending.

“I _wouldn’t_.” She surprises herself first with the vehemence of her response, and then by her follow-up move, which is to hurl an unused wad of gauze at Ginn. It bounces off Ginn’s weirdly pale shoulder, causing Ginn to screw up her nose for a second, looking startled. “Just because I’m not a _badass_ doesn’t make me a bad person. You came to me for help, remember? _Me. You_ needed _my_ help.”

“No. I was mistaken.”

“Right. That’s why you’re slathered in Neosporin and watching soap operas on my couch.”

Ginn does this sort of shoulders-back head-toss that probably worked a lot better when she could finish it with a hair-flip. She still manages to look like a queen gathering up her raiments, which is really just not fair, Chloe thinks, considering that she’s sitting there half-naked with her arms flattening her nipples. “I don’t know,” she says with icy dignity, “what is a soap opera.”

Chloe pushes herself off the couch, marches over to the bookshelf, and runs her pointer finger along a row of books that she’d collected from all her Harvard seminar classes: _Democracy in America, Mrs. Dalloway, East of Eden, Midnight’s Children, The English Patient,_ the collected writings of Thomas Paine. She keeps going until she hits the _American Heritage Dictionary_ : a big solid wedge of a book, a brick. She tips it off the shelf, carries it across the room, and drops it unceremoniously in Ginn’s lap. “Knock yourself out,” she says tightly, and stalks towards the stairway.

Ginn calls after her, sounding sulky, “When will the fudge mint cookies be renewed in the small room?”

Chloe doesn’t turn around. “I don’t know,” she says between clenched teeth. “Why don’t you go to the store and buy some?”

There’s no reply from the direction of the sofa.

Chloe feels a mean thrill of victory, but it doesn’t even last her the whole way up the stairs.

That was a low blow, she thinks.

* * *

It was a low blow because the fourth question Chloe doesn’t ask is: Why don’t you ever leave the house?

This is a question that’s specific to Ginn, and that only really becomes a full-fledged question at the end of the first week, when Dr. Rush agrees to come with Chloe to the farmer’s market.

Chloe had canceled her Wednesday volunteer shift at the Monkgusset Farm stand because she didn’t feel like she could leave Dr. Rush and Ginn alone in her townhouse. She was afraid that something would happen to them— although she didn’t know why _her_ presence would really protect against that; it wasn’t like she really did anything except make sandwiches and pot roast and meatballs and occasionally play school nurse. But she was more afraid that one or both of them would end up burning something down or blowing something up.

It wasn’t that Ginn hadn’t been working with Dr. Rush, trying to make him better. Practically every day since they’d gotten to her house, Chloe had come downstairs at some point to find Ginn badgering Rush with rapid-fire questions about math, poetry, geography, and Ancient while tapping away at her computer with her distinctive super-fast typing style. Chloe would never admit it, but she's kind of fascinated by Ginn’s typing. There's something just a little bit alien about it, like she's used to working on a different kind of keyboard, or at a different level of gravity, and so presses the keys a little bit softer. Her hands are like very deft and clever little spiders, or crustaceans testing drifts of underwater sand with their delicate claws.

“Euler’s number,” Ginn would say, during these sessions, and Dr. Rush would say, “2.7182818284—“

“No, its function,” Ginn would say.

“The base of the natural logarithm.”

“What is the capital of Malaysia?”

“Kuala Lumpur.”

“How do you feel?”

“Fuck off,” Dr. Rush would say, without any real rancor.

“Rush.”

“I’ve got a headache. You _are_ my headache. I’ve always got a headache, these days.”

Ginn would frown, and her hands would skitter across the keyboard. “You should not have a headache.”

“It’s my natural fuckin’ condition,” Dr. Rush would say, and stretch out across the couch in a way that somehow managed to be wired with tension, which Chloe hadn’t thought that stretching could be. Or else he’d be up and on his feet, wandering around the room: not pacing, but… skittering, like Ginn’s hands on the computer keys.

“Remember me your first experience of the stargate. Can you do so?”

And Rush would usually press his lips together in a hard thin line. “Why the fuck should I? And why the _fuck_ do I sound like this?”

“I do not know what you mean,” Ginn would say. “It is the way you sound.”

Ginn is always really patient with Rush, and Chloe likes that. She’s kind of jealous of it, maybe. Of _it_ , because she’s not sure who she’s jealous of, exactly. She sits, sometimes, in a hidden spot at the top of the stairs and listens to them, their back and forth, barbed and overeducated and acidic, but oddly comfortable, somehow. Maybe this is the way that two people talk when each of them has risked their life for the other. Chloe wouldn’t know. She’s never risked her life for anyone. When she hears it, she feels like a hole has opened up inside of her, just a little bit to the left of her heart. She probes it like she probes the cut edge of her tooth with her tongue, not really sure what to make of this defect, or what to do with it now that it’s there.

But, like, how stupid is it, that feeling, when the world Chloe lives in is one where _no one_ risks their life? —Except her dad. Her dad had lived in a different kind of world, and Chloe hadn’t realized it until she’d briefly stumbled into it. She doesn’t live in that world. But she wonders what it would be like if she did.

If maybe she’d know how to speak the language, then. The one that Dr. Rush and Ginn speak.

She doesn’t want that. Not really. She wouldn’t even be good at it, she thinks. She was bad at it in Colorado. And now she’s not much better, with her Neosporin and her meatball-making. All she does is teach Ginn how to change channels with the DirecTV remote, and write grocery lists. She can’t wait to go back to doing something that she’s good at. Really.

“I do not know what you mean,” Ginn always says to Dr. Rush. “It is the way you sound. You attach too great importance to this mouth matter, when you are improving. Soon you will be better entirely. You will remember. You will be yourself once more, and then—”

She doesn’t supply her understanding of what’s going to happen then. She leaves the sentence hanging, a tentative rope that she’s dangled into the dark pit of the future in the hope that maybe she’ll feel, at some point, a sharp tug on the end. A life sign.

But Chloe isn’t so sure that Dr. Rush _is_ improving.

That’s why she offers to take Ginn and him with her to the market, when she tells them that she can’t cancel another one of her shifts. “Community obligations are a good way of establishing stability,” she explains. “And stability is a universal human need. I can’t just ignore my universal human needs because you’re here. I’m already going through a transitional era. Plus, it would look _really_ bad if I bailed on such short notice, and you never know when you’re going to end up needing a good opinion.” That’s something her mother always used to say: You never know when you’re going to end up needing a good opinion. She’d reminded Chloe’s dad whenever she thought that he wasn’t doing enough politicking.

“A farmer’s market,” Dr. Rush says distastefully.

“It’s not, you know, all hippies. I mean, there are some hippies. But most people are really cool. Plus, don’t you want to get out of the house?”

Rush hesitates, narrowing his eyes, obviously conflicted. He does, Chloe knows, want to get out of the house. It’d been his first instinct, after waking up. “I do not,” he says, enunciating the words with a certain amount of dignity, “sell vegetables. I am not a _seller_ of _vegetables_. I do not _peddle._ I do not _hawk._ ”

“Well, okay. You can just sit there, I guess. Ginn and I can sell the vegetables.”

“No,” Ginn says. She’s staring at her computer with a fixed and lopsided expression.

And that startles Chloe a little bit. She’d thought that Ginn would go wherever Rush went, basically. She’d thought that, if anything, it would’ve been harder to get Ginn _not_ to go. So far Ginn’s refused to go with Chloe to Whole Foods to buy groceries and to Target to pick out shower wash and clothes; and Chloe had assumed it was because neither of them had thought Rush was up to the trip, and Ginn wouldn’t go without him. “No?”

“I am not interested in your Tau’ri commerce. It is below my attention. I will remain. I have important work. I must alter the transmitter code.”

There’s a pause. Dr. Rush slides Ginn a covert, questioning glance that she ignores as resolutely as she’s ignoring Chloe’s more overt look.

“Okay,” Chloe says after a moment. “I guess. I mean, you know that if you blow up my house, you’ll probably have to move into a homeless shelter, and they won’t let you watch TV there.”

Ginn offers a stiff, one-shouldered shrug that’s obviously meant to indicated her lack of interest. But Chloe doesn’t think that she’s disinterested, exactly. Chloe’s involuntarily adding up all the errands that Ginn’s refused to run with her. It’s been logical for her to worry about letting Rush leave the house; he’s liable to turn a street corner and get confused about where he was going and where he’d come from, in which case he might break a traffic light or something. But there’s been no real reason for Ginn had to stay hidden. She can pass for normal, if she puts a decent shirt on. She can almost pass for okay. For some reason, she just doesn’t want to.

Chloe watches her while Dr. Rush goes, grumbling, in search of the sneakers that Chloe had bought him— black Converse high-tops, the same as Ginn’s. Ginn pretends not to be aware of Chloe’s watching, and so Chloe in turn pretends not to be aware that Ginn’s aware. She sees a muscle at the corner of Ginn’s jaw tighten, and is surprised that she can register so small a difference in Ginn’s face. Maybe it’s because Ginn really only has the one expression: hard and betrayed and a little bit sullen. It makes sense that Chloe would notice the variations.

Dr. Rush wanders in, then, looking piqued, his shoelaces trailing, and Chloe says, brightly, “Ready?”

He replies with a noncommittal huff of breath, and she opens the door.

Outside, the sky is blue: the remote and faraway blue of autumn, which makes the world seem larger than it is. The low roofs of DC are stuck with damp brown leaves. It’s Halloween, Chloe realizes with a sense of startlement. This weekend is Halloween. She’s had so little sense of time passing that it hadn’t even occurred to her.

She closes her eyes, breathing in the scent of early frost against concrete.

She isn’t so sure that any of them are improving, she thinks.

* * *

All her questions tangle themselves into a restless, whirling knot that seems to settle at the base of her brain as she walks with Dr. Rush down to the Metro station, wrapping her tartan scarf twice around her neck and carefully ensuring its fringed ends lie flat. The questions seem to turn themselves into other kinds of questions, or maybe they’ve just found a way to reproduce, so that the longer she keeps them pent-up inside of her, the more offspring they breed together. What do you think is going on here? she wants to ask Rush. What do you think is going to happen? Do you even have any idea?

She’s so used to adults knowing more than she does. Her life has always, she guesses, been a little bit arranged by them. Not in a bad way; just— there were always expectations. What she’d do; how she’d perform; the person she would be. She’d never minded. She’d wanted to be that person. But Rush doesn’t have any expectations of her. She’s not sure he always knows who she _is_ , honestly, which she’s surprised to find is kind of a relief. She’s not her father’s daughter to Rush; she’s not her _dead_ father’s daughter; she’s no one’s daughter. She’s no one. She’s just a girl who, for reasons Rush may not understand, keeps cooking for him and buying him clothes and giving him a place to sleep.

As they walk, she watches the way that Dr. Rush maneuvers himself down the sidewalk. There’s a twitchy restlessness to him that she thinks she remembers from before, though she knows that memory is fallible, and maybe this an optimistic thought. He’s like a rubber band that’s always reaching a little further than it was made for. But there’s also this new uncertainty to him. When they reach the Metro and descend to its hollow, hushed, stylized platform, he paces off towards the entrance to the tunnel for a moment’s beat, and Chloe half-expects him to dissolve— just turn into a swarm of gray moths or a lot of little bits of paper that go flying apart into the dark. It’s a silly idea; she doesn’t know why she imagines it. She looks away, trying to keep herself on track.

“You should make sure not to push your hair back,” she tells him. “Because of the—“ She gestures.

He lifts his hands automatically to his temples, touching the two pin-sized silver buttons there. “You shouldn’t’ve had me leave the house, if you were so worried.”

“It didn’t occur to me. I guess I’m used to them.”

“Used to them,” Rush says, as though he’s trying to parse her meaning. His brow is furrowed. He traces one of the transmitters with a fingertip.

“Yeah,” Chloe says. “I mean— it’s like a second set of glasses. But. Um. Not on your eyes. You should,” she adds hastily, feeling like she’s fumbling, “—you should probably also try not to show people your hand.”

“My hand?” He looks down at it.

“With the— scar.” She had noticed the scar on the second day. It had taken her longer to realize that it was a stargate glyph.

“People have scars, don’t they?” He curls his fist to hide the mark.

“It’s just an unusual one.”

“Yes,” he says. He stares down at his hand. “I know.”

“You know?”

“It doesn’t feel like a scar.”

Chloe looks at him sidelong. “What does it feel like?”

It takes Dr. Rush a long time to answer. “Like something touched me,” he says distantly, flexing the tendons of his fist, “and left a mark. It reached out a very long way… It stretched out its fingertip and… just…“

The dove-colored light of the vaulted, cavernous station seems to settle its wings on him. His face is in shadow for a moment. He shivers, and looks up.

“The train’s coming,” he says.

And, after a beat, it is. She doesn’t ask how he had sensed it.

So that’s another question that she isn’t asking him.

* * *

At the market, it’s her turn not to be asked questions, although she senses everyone’s intense curiosity. Andy and Layla, who run the farm, rib her gently about being unreliable— this is the first time she’s ever canceled a shift— and accept the story she’s concocted about Dr. Rush being one of her old Harvard professors, in DC to do a week of research. Chloe supposes that, even in Converse high-tops and with a blue hoodie on under his tweed blazer, he does seem like an Ivy League professor. There’s a prickly edge of genius that he never seems to hide or lose.

It makes him a less than ideal vegetable salesman.

“Eggplant,” he says in disgust, pushing his folding chair back and cramming his hands into the pockets of the blazer. “ _Eggplant._ Fucking ridiculous name. Are we just pointing at things, now, and saying what they look like? It’s a fucking aubergine. An _aubergine._ A perfectly distinguished etymology, from the Persian.”

Chloe smiles determinedly at the woman she’s helping. “Here’s your change,” she says, and holds out a dollar bill.

“And _pumpkin_ is aesthetically, if not etymologically, as offensive. It’s like a term of fucking endearment, for a melon.”

Pumpkins are where the farmer’s market is doing most of its trade. There must’ve been some kind of kids’ costume parade or Halloween carnival earlier; the park is full of tiny fairies and princesses and ninjas hurtling between tables while their parents pick out last-minute jack-o’-lanterns. Chloe remembers being that age. Her dad would drive the whole family out to rural Virginia so Chloe could pick her own pumpkins off the vine. Later, they would carve them in the kitchen while the seeds cooked in the oven on a slow roast.

When she was a kid, Chloe had found the emptiness of pumpkins’ insides surprising. They seemed so tough; solid and rinded. Whenever she’d cut them open, it’d seemed to her like there should be something more there. But there was just seeds and strings, and nothing at the very center. She’d assumed that there _had_ been more, maybe, at one point, and that it had escaped in the act of cutting. It was a reasonable idea; she’d felt already like she was always looking for the center of things and being faintly disappointed. And she knew that there were certain things that died if you tried to preserve them. Like butterflies, which you weren’t supposed to touch.

But when her father had heard this, he’d laughed and said that the empty space was there so that the pumpkin could keep growing. It had been a new idea to her, that things grew on the inside as well as the outside. She had bent her head to one of the uncut pumpkins and pressed her ear against it, listening for the sound of the insides growing, filling up the space. She'd been curious; she didn’t know what it would sound like. She'd wanted to hear.

It makes her a little bit sad to think of now, though she doesn’t know why. “I like pumpkins,” she says.

Dr. Rush frowns out at the market, where a strong wind is blowing, sweeping through and tangling all the little princesses’ skirts. “There was,” he says, his voice suddenly turning distant in the troubling way it does, “someone— that is to say, I knew someone who— When he came to America, he thought it would be full of pumpkins.”

“Well,” Chloe says, gesturing out at the market. “—It is.”

Rush blinks, as though this hadn’t occurred to him. “Yes,” he says at last. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

His arms are folded loosely across his chest. A crease appears on his forehead, suggesting some idea he’s struggling to get a handle on. He stares at the rows of pumpkins surrounding the stall on the other side of the sidewalk, big and glossy and still with a twist of a stem for ornamentation. A grackle settles on top of one, before it’s shooed away by the stall’s owner. A cloud passes over the face of the sun. Everything’s so perfectly autumnal that Chloe can’t stand it; she has the sudden impulse to take a knife to the scene, to cut it open the same way she used to cut open pumpkins. She’s not sure if she’s hoping to find something or nothing inside. And then she’s not sure that it’s really the market she wants to cut open, but she doesn’t know what else it could be, so she supposes that it is.

* * *

On the walk from the Metro station back to the house, Dr. Rush carries the box of vegetables that Chloe picked out at the market. Well— vegetables and apples and a couple of mid-sized pie pumpkins. Chloe’s not sure she feels up to carving them— although she has to cough to cover a laugh when she pictures Ginn and her mercenary knife giving it a go— but she thinks she’ll set them out on the doorstep with the others, to show whatever it is you’re supposed to show with these displays of seasonal awareness.

Gray clouds scud through the sky as nightfall approaches. Rush wraps his arms around the battered box and stares down at its contents. Gradually, his pace slows. His expression turns pensive.

“You should give Ginn your other bedroom,” he says eventually, right about the time that a very light rain starts falling, barely a sprinkle here and there.“The one on the third story. It isn’t good for her to sleep on the floor.”

Chloe steals a look at him. “For how long?” It’s the closest she’s come to asking the question.

“Oh—“ He frowns. “I should think she’ll crack the code quite soon.” The frown deepens. “The code,” he repeats thoughtfully.

Chloe says, “The computer code for the transmitters, you mean.”

His gaze swings to her, suddenly, piercing. “What else would I mean?”

She’s taken aback. “Just— you were working on a code before. A set of ciphers. Ginn was helping you with them, I think.” Ginn had implied as much, although they haven’t really talked about it, since it’s hard to have a rational conversation about Stargate Command with Ginn.

For some reason Chloe had thought that Dr. Rush remembered the ciphers. It hadn’t occurred to her that he hasn’t talked about them. She’s been getting the two of him mixed up, the old him and the new him. Not that there are two of him, the way that he keeps insisting, but— sometimes the difference is important, just practically speaking.

“Ciphers,” Rush whispers. He comes to a halt. His expression is haunted. “A set of ten ciphers. I remember.”

“Nine,” Chloe, a little unsure, corrects.

He shakes his head faintly, a distinct rejection.

Chloe says, “I don’t understand.”

For a long moment, Rush says nothing. Then, his voice very distant, almost as though he’s in a trance, he says, “There’s a similar concept in art: negative space. But we didn’t inherit it in music, their passion for the note that isn’t there. The absence whose absence is part of the music. They were obsessed with the cracks in the walls, with the silences, the strings that go unplayed, words that go unsaid—“

Bewildered, Chloe says, “I thought we were talking about the ciphers.”

“Yes. The tenth one. The ghost note,” Rush says.

And then, without warning, his grip on the box of produce slackens. The box slips from his arms and hits the damp sidewalk, jouncing a pumpkin and a couple of winesap apples loose, sending them rolling across the concrete. To her shame, that’s Chloe’s first concern: _Oh no!_ she thinks in dismay. _The apples are going to get bruises!_ She’s already started, automatically, to bend down and scoop them up when she realizes that Dr. Rush hasn’t said anything. He’s just kind of standing there, hands at his sides, staring into the distance.

“Dr. Rush?” she ventures, looking at up at him.

Rush goes limp. His legs just sort of fold under him, like they’re made of sticks instead of muscle, and Chloe only manages to stop him from hitting his head by catching him and making sure he falls against her. He’s not heavy, fortunately, but she still ends up staggering a little. She has to lay him down in someone’s flower bed.

“Dr. Rush?” she says again, a little frantically, and checks to make sure that he’s breathing.

He is. He doesn’t even seem to be unconscious, really. His eyes are closed, but his eyes are moving under his eyelids— fast, like people’s eyes do when they’re dreaming. Rapid eye movement. REM. His jaw clenches and unclenches over and over, almost as though he’s trying to speak and can’t manage to get the words out.

Abstractly, Chloe understands that he’s having a seizure. Ginn had told her it was something that happened to him; it’s not the biggest leap to make. But it hasn’t happened _here_ , with _her_ , unless you count the times when he fried the electrics and passed out, and when Ginn told her, she hadn’t said what to do. Maybe Ginn hadn’t known what to do. Maybe no one had ever done anything about it.

He doesn’t seem like he’s hurting himself, at least. And Chloe knows not to put anything in his mouth. So what she ends up doing is just sitting there, helpless, for about two minutes, watching his forehead dampen with rain and sweat. It feels horribly like being back in the stairwell, where the only thing that really mattered had already happened, and there was nothing that she could do about it, so everything she felt came wrapped in a sour layer of too-late-too-late-too-late. She swallows convulsively; even though she knows it’s irrational, she can almost taste the indigo gas that the Lucian Alliance were using.

But this isn’t the stairwell. Not everything repeats itself. At the end of those two minutes, Rush blinks up at her. He looks confused.

“I’m sorry,” he says uncertainly. “Was I— saying something?”

“I think you had a seizure,” Chloe says. Her voice comes out shaky. “You dropped my apples.”

“Did I?” Rush pushed himself up on an elbow, grimacing. “Christ, my head is doing me. You haven’t got any cigarettes, have you?”

She frowns. “What?”

“Cigarettes,” he says, and then enunciates: “Cig-a-rettes.”

Chloe huffs out a breath that’s half-frustration and half the aftermath of panic. “Why do you always try to do the worst thing possible when you wake up from— from—“

There’s the hint of a flinch in his closed expression, maybe warning her not to finish the sentence, or maybe because he knows that she can’t.

She sighs. “No. I do not have _cigarettes_.”

“Well, then,” he says, and gestures vaguely in a way that doesn’t really communicate anything.

"We could stop by CVS, I guess. But the last thing you should be doing right now is putting more toxins in your system.”

“Aye, I’m sure that’s what you think.” Rush grimaces again and brings his hand up to his mouth, looking almost queasy.

“If anything, you should probably do some kind of cleanse.”

The queasiness morphs into an astonished revulsion. Rush eyes her flatly. “A cleanse.”

Chloe rolls her eyes and reaches a hand out to help him sit up. “You _do_ know who you are, right?” she asks, just to be certain. “And you know who I am?”

“Yes, yes.” Rush manages to make it to a seated position. “I’m fine. I’m perfectly fine. Farmer’s market. Pumpkins. Eggplant. Ciphers.”

“—I don’t think you should think about the ciphers,” Chloe says unsurely.

“I’ll think about whatever I bloody well wish to.”

She inches back at the tone in his voice, and climbs to her feet after a moment, hugging her arms across her chest. “I just meant— I think it might be a bad idea.”

Rush also lurches to his feet, much less steadily than Chloe had managed. “Yes, well— perhaps we could start with the cigarettes, and I will see thence what polar urges of the unwise I feel compelled to turn my needle-sharp face towards.”

“I’m pretty sure I’d have to diagram that sentence to understand it,” Chloe says. But she smiles wanly, because he sounded a lot like the old Rush, right then, and because she doesn’t want him to think that she’s worried, even though she is worried. She’s worried, because his hands are shaking. “You’re okay, though?” she says anyway. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

Dr. Rush nods distractedly, brushing damp leaves off his coat. “Of course I am.”

And he’s so convincing that she lets herself embrace the normality of it for a second, even though she doesn’t know what it says that _normality_ is now apparently carting vegetables home with an amnesiac on-the-run space mathematician who she’s helping hide from mercenaries and the U.S. Air Force. “I should be mad at you,” she says. “I bet my apples are all banged up. And you can’t buy the winesap ones in stores.”

What she wants to say, really, is: _You scared me._

 _Do you even know what’s happening to you?_ she wants to ask.

But she doesn’t ask.

Instead, she watches as Rush picks up an apple and inspects it ruefully. “Alas,” he says. “I very much suspect that all that struck the earth, no matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, must go to the cider-apple heap as of no worth.”

Chloe holds the cardboard box out. “That’s a poem,” she says. “Isn’t it?”

“Unfortunately.” Rush is looking around for more apples. “I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight/ I got from looking through a pane of glass / I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough…” His voice trails off. “And held against the world of hoary grass.” Another pause. He’s turned away from her, and so she can’t see the expression on his face. “It melted,” he says at last. "I let it fall and break. Is this your pumpkin here? It appears to be in pieces.”

“Oh,” Chloe says. “Yes.”

The pie pumpkin that had rolled out of the box when Rush dropped it had apparently hit the sidewalk and split, its strong hull fracturing to show the wet and stringy insides. She’s always hated that, when people smash pumpkins on the sidewalk; there’s something awful about their breaking-apart, the way they collapse. Maybe, superstitiously, she still feels there’s something inside them that needs protecting, even if it’s just the space where more could someday grow. She picks up the largest piece of the pie pumpkin and feels the urge to apologize to it. She holds it: the perfect curve of the rind balanced in her hand.

“Apologies,” Rush says brusquely, echoing her thought. He looks nervous and uncomfortable with the act of saying he’s sorry. “There’s no putting it back together, I suppose?”

Chloe places the rind back carefully on the ground where she had found it. “No,” she says. “There never is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rush quotes (and slightly misquotes) Robert Frost's "After Apple-picking."


	46. Fugue, Pt. 3: C

Being the other Ginn, which is to say being the Ginn who was once other, before she stepped out of her mirror and submitted herself to receive the role of primary, of-the-fact, and perhaps now exclusive Ginn, transpires to be a process that requires some ‘getting-used-to,’ a phrase that many individuals at the Stargate mountain were frequently supine to employ. Ginn comprehends the function of the phrase, but finds its grammar confusing. _Getting used to what?_ she had once asked. No one had proved able to offer a satisfactory explanation. _And_ , Ginn thinks, _getting used by what?_

As though there were a puppet-hand of fate, and she was no more than the scrap-of-fur long-necked creature that the mountain’s psyche doctor had bade her wear upon fingers when she wished to talk. A giraffe, the doctor had called it. It had been spotted. It has the largest heart of any mammal, the doctor had said. Imagine that you’re talking in the voice of someone that that’s true for. Make sure you’re speaking from your giraffe-heart.

But most of the peoples in the Lucian Alliance locate the physical seat of emotions elsewhere, in the liver or in the lungs, so Ginn had not understood— not till later, when Rush had explained it to her. “Giraffes,” he’d said in disgust. “Christ. They allow that man to work with child soldiers? I’ll speak to Jackson; you’re not going back there again.”

Ginn had been particularly bewildered, back then, by the idea of speaking to herself as though she were a separate entity that needed speaking-to. Now she understands, of course, how one can be oneself and yet other, how one can live and die in interpinioned multitudes.

She had been getting used as Ginn, to perform the ellipsed or omitted action that one is used for, is used _to_. And now she is getting used as this other Ginn, and she requires some quantity of the execution to pass before she can render judgement upon her performance.

In being the new Ginn, she has accepted certain limitations. Her body hurts more than it did before. The knife-wounds close, but slowly; the burns leave white marks as they heal. She can feel her bones under the thin new skin, pressing up against it. She doesn’t sleep well. She thinks that some part of her, deep down, senses the transfer— one Ginn for another— and finds itself uneasy with it. It knows that something has changed, but cannot point a pin in the alteration, and therefore it is wary. It refuses to rest.

Neither does she wholly trust the newness of her body. When she walks, she feels off-balance. When she cleans her weapons, her hands sometimes spasm and grip the small mechanical parts of the guns. Food tastes strange. Water’s sometimes sour. She goes to the sink and spits it out. The girl, Chloe Armstrong, says, “You’re going to die of scurvy if you don’t eat a vegetable,” when she see what Ginn eats and doesn’t. Or, when she sees Ginn wince or flinch, “You’re going to die of blood poisoning if you aren’t more careful with those burns.” But Ginn thinks that Chloe Armstrong will die before she does, because no one has properly trained her in survival, and if they had attempted it she would have flattened her lips and lifted her thin painted eyebrows in complaining.

When Ginn had programmed the Asgard transporter, she had imagined Chloe Armstrong as someone akin to Samantha Carter: plainspoken, warm, energetic, and quick. Or perhaps the woman Perry who had worked with her on coding: elegant in a way that was accentuated by her injuries, with a very blackly humorous center that Ginn did not trust, but could understand.

She had not imagined Chloe Armstrong as this flustered girl-child whose chief asset, so far as Ginn can tell, is an inexhaustible supply of electronic monies. It is by consequence of these monies, according to Rush, that Chloe has a house containing rooms that cool and warm at a button, filled with furnitures that come in lavender and aquamarine. Chloe has blankets stuffed with the wingfeathers of many flying creatures, and a TV with five hundred channels and digital video recording, and many kitchen apparatuses. Chloe has a horse that she keeps in a stable in a place called Virginia, like a knight in ancient Scotland, even though she is not a knight. In the evening, Chloe bathes her face with six arcane concoctions that smell of herbs and minerals. Ginn has observed her do this, peering at her in fascination, before Chloe said in a keenly bladed voice, “Um, do you _mind?_ Can you close the door?”

When Chloe takes Rush to the farm market, Ginn seizes upon the opportunity to further investigate these bathing-agents. She slips into the warm lit space of the bathroom, the walls of which are painted like a peach fruit, and opens the mirrored door to the bathroom shelves. There are many items on these shelves, not only the night washes— waxy sticks of lip paint, and ink of a human skin color, and powder in flat cakes of glittering greens and blues and golds. There are pens, too: black and brown and purple and crimson, tipped very softly. Ginn tests one against the inside of her wrist. It writes a smooth line. She outlines the length of a vein in violet. But then she thinks of Simeon and feels sick.

She stows the pen back on the shelf and removes the bottles that she has seen Chloe use. They are very extremely small. The fact of their smallness makes her feel reverent towards them. She is reminded of Ancient artifacts, like with Rush’s transmitters— the things that people find in the ruins, things that are the right size for survival.

One of the bottles is labeled an “elixir” that is made from liquid crystal. Ginn squeezes a drop of it onto her fingertip and tilts her head, regarding it curiously. She cannot glimpse any element of crystal in it, but all the same she makes certain to hold it as carefully as a gemstone.

“Elixir,” she says aloud. “This is my liquid crystal elixir. Its cost is six thousand of dollars. It comes from a planet so hot that all the stones have melted. I wash my face with it because not all persons can be blessed with great skin, okay, and it is perfectly normal. It is the twenty-first of centuries. Everyone possesses a skincare routine.”

This is what Chloe had said when Ginn asked about the bottles: it’s perfectly normal. Everyone possesses a skincare routine.

Ginn looks at the gleaming bead of elixir upon her finger. It is reminiscent of a teardrop.

Abruptly she scrubs her hand against her blue jean trousers, wasteful of the strange liquid and angry without really knowing why. She replaces the bottles, shuts the mirror, and straightens Chloe’s set of hairbrushes: one indigo plastic, and the other wooden-backed, with bristles made from the hair of a beast. She must not leave any trace of her presence amongst Chloe’s possessions. This is difficult when all of the beautiful objects seem made not to be touched, or to be touched only by Chloe’s very clean and polished fingers.

Not even Kiva, Ginn thinks, had considered it her due to possess so many beautiful objects. Or had paid for them in blood and battle, and so knew very precisely their worth.

As she turns to go, she glimpses herself in the silvered glass of the mirror: a starved and sullen-faced, bareheaded boy of a girl. It seems to her then that she has not still left the bronze room on that planet where she had first met the stranger who bore this face. But that was the bargain she had made. And anyway— “I saved us,” she whispers to the bathroom mirror fiercely. “I’m the one who saved us. Me. _I_ did.”

Salvation is not beautiful. It does not have to be beautiful. It is already a luxury. No person can afford the further cost of making it more than it is.

* * *

She finds that the house feels bereft without Rush inside of it. His presence had transformed it into something not of Earth. Now that he has departed, its Tau’ri bones come out from hiding. The air is cold and the gravity is wrong and the doors do not open in a way Ginn prefers; she is forever tugging at one instead of turning the handle, or standing and waiting for its two sides to part, as they do on ships or in the Stargate mountain.

Animals make animal noises outside the window, which she finds unsettling.

She watches television for a time, and then sits with her back to the wall by the door with her knees hiked in a pyramid against her chest. She places the American Heritage Dictionary on the floor beside her and reads it, turning the gold-foil-thin weight of its paper pages with a careful fingertip. She acquires the words _refocillation, exosmose,_ and _heliophagous._ Thus, she waits for Rush and Chloe to come home.

You could have accompanied them, she reminds herself.

But she had not wished to.

She had wished not to.

She had wanted for the Stargate mountain, or any comparable location, interred within the solid body of the un-Tau’ri, incapitalized-e earth.

* * *

But then when Chloe and Rush return, she affects a posture of indifference: lain upon the couch, with the television on. Her eyes flick idly over the contents of the flexible paper box that Chloe is bearing. “Plants,” she says with disdain. “More plants.”

Chloe kicks the door closed and says, “Dr. Rush had a seizure.”

That is an end of indifference. In her hastiness to reach Rush, Ginn climbs over the back of the couch.

Rush is wet, because Chloe has failed to shelter him from rainwater. He appears tired, because he is often tired. He is all shades of blue and brown: the transmitters’ blue light being a-flicker at his temples, the blue skin under his eyes as though he has been struck, the heavy hooded shirt in a color that Chloe has described as “navy,” though halfway through an ill-executed explanation of this term, she had quitted the dialogue after angering herself with Ginn. The dark of his eyes, his damp hair, the sun-stains on his cheekbones.

“It was nothing. I’m all right,” he says.

Chloe says, “It wasn’t nothing.”

Ginn turns round upon her. “What did you do to him?”

“Um, kept him from _hitting his head_ and giving himself an _aneurysm?_ ” Chloe says, her voice arising. “Tried to stop him from doing something stupid? What do you _think?_ I didn’t do anything!”

“He has not seized before on Earth!” Ginn says accusingly, reaching out for Rush’s hand so that she can measure the beating of his heart at his wrist.

“I didn’t make him have a fucking seizure!” Chloe snaps. “What is _wrong_ with you?”

Rush makes a jerk away from Ginn and removes a cigarette box from his pocket. “Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry, “did I miss the part of this conversation where I accidentally fucking disappeared?” His hand on the cigarette box has a tremble.

Chloe shuts her eyes. “You can _not_ smoke in my house,” she says.

Rush hits the cigarette box against his palm. “Fucking try to stop me,” he says tersely. “Ginn— have you got a copy of the ciphertext?”

Ginn gives a look at Chloe without spite of herself.

“I didn’t ask Chloe; I asked _you_ ,” Rush says. He is displaying a brief temper.

Chloe says wearily, “I told him not to think about it. I think it’s what caused the—“ She creates a gesture. “You know.”

“You’re incorrect,” Rush says, his consonantal sounds muffled by the cigarette that he has stuck in his mouth.

Chloe glares at him. “ _Seriously_ ,” she says. “And I’m not incorrect. You were talking about the ciphers, saying all sorts of crazy stuff— music and ghosts and, I don’t know, history of art, and you just _stopped_.”

Ginn curves her hands into fists at the mention of music. “Rush,” she says.

“Fuck you, too,” Rush says. “Don’t talk to me like I’m fucking child. I'm not _helpless._ ” He applies a portable flame to his cigarette. Silver smoke tumbles forth in dynamical tendrils, tying its self-knots in the air.

A machine on the ceiling beeps once, wanly, before Rush fixes it with a furious expression. Then, emitting a meek few sparks, it subsides.

Chloe shuts her eyes. “You know what? I’ll be pouring myself a glass of wine,” she says to Ginn. “If you need me.”

 _We do not need you_ , Ginn thinks spitefully as she watches her stalk to the kitchen. But she does not say this.

Instead, she turns to face Rush. She makes a study of him for a moment. This he is aware of, though he does not return her look.

“It is not good,” she says at last, “for you to think about music.”

Rush holds his cigarette between two unsteady fingers. Fixed-faced, he regards the floor. “I know,” he says. “I’ve known that for— quite a long time.”

“The cipher was killing you.”

“It was killing someone.”

“ _You_.” Ginn’s voice is such as though it had been put through a strainer, weakened and deprived of all the substantialest bits. “It was killing you. It was _killing_ you.”

“Even if it was, is that really the worst that could happen?” Rush crosses the room on a restless, disjointed journey, then touching a hand to the painted wall and pacing back to the other side again.

Deprived of utterances, Ginn stares at him.

“What _am_ I, after all?” Rush presses. He has an animal’s eyes, white at the edges. Ginn thinks of the Other Ginn’s eyes, of _her_ eyes, in the cell. “I mean— what is _it,_ what is it that I am? A straw man woven out of the filaments of neurons; a fucking lightning-storm single-second St-Elmo’s-fire net cast out into the sea of consciousness, executing everyone it touches; particles falling apart in the substrate of the artistic fucking ionosphere, a pattern that’s there and gone and then it’s onto the next fucking pattern. You think the cipher is killing me? What do you estimate is my current lifespan? I’ve been thirty fucking people in the last two weeks alone. I’m guessing, but of course I don’t know; how could I, when you keep killing me?”

“No,” Ginn says, feeling a muscle in her gut spasm as though she has been hit by a fist.

Rush does not attend her. “You and your _device_ ,” he says, touching the transmitters at his temples. “Every time you touch your keyboard, I turn out different. I suppose you weren’t the first, though again: I can’t remember. Somehow I feel I’ve got quite used to it. There’s no art to it, not really; or is there? Perhaps it’s an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it—“

“ _Don’t.”_ Deprived of a knowledge of what to do, but urgent to engender silence, Ginn locates the American Heritage Dictionary beside the door and lashes out with a foot, propelling it across the room. “I know what I am,” she says fiercely, though her breath is constricted in her body, at war with the closed narrow frame of her chest. “I do not require your narrativization. I may be a killer, but I will not be _your_ killer. You are alive. I will make you be alive.”

Rush toes at the book, which has almost reached him. He will not now eye her. He breathes smoke through the cigarette in his mouth. “I absolve you,” he says tonelessly, “of both the guilt and the burden. After all, you always effect a resurrection. And in the end, there isn’t really a _me_ to kill.”

Ginn shakes her head— so violently that it makes her head hurt. “No. You are not correct. If you believe so, then why permit me to write on your coding? Why remain; why answer my questions? You know. You _know_ you are Rush!”

“Perhaps I was only waiting to remember the ciphers,” Rush says. “The part that matters. Perhaps I was waiting for that.”

Ginn shakes her head again. “This is what _they_ thought. ‘The part that matters.’ Kiva. Telford, for a time. Young, even. I cannot believe you would stand upon their side.”

“You’ll find I’m on my own side, I think.” Rush doesn’t look up.

“I am sure you believe this. And I am sure when I say that there are personages who are upon your side, you will tell me that they are on the side of _someone_ , a _someone_ who is not you, as though you can sever yourself from all the world, even the man you have been. But you do not live with all the world in such a state of severance.” Ginn pauses. “And some things, at any rate, you remember.”

“Yes, well,” Rush says bitterly. “I’m afraid that what I remember hardly serves as an enticement.” He toes at the dictionary again, flinching it across the floor in pushes the length of an inch or so. “You’ve not visited Glasgow; allow me to characterize it for you: a shithole.”

Ginn says, “You taught me a poem about it.” Her throat aches her. “I still remember. _Here is the bird that never flew—“_

Rush flinches. The line of smoke stutters where it rises from the cigarette in his hand.

“ _Here is the tree that never grew.”_

Rush says harshly, “I have no memory of teaching you that.”

“ _Here is the bell that never rang,_ ” Ginn persists.

“I appreciate that you feel a certain obligation. However—“

“ _Here is the fish that never swam._ ” Her voice turns to water on the final vowel. “I do not know what else on Earth a fish can do. I have tried to puzzle it. I think perhaps in Glasgow the fishes go flying. I’m not certain. It is difficult to understand.”

Rush says nothing.

“I like to picture it,” Ginn says, choking back a raft of miserable-feeling that feels set-adrift upon her insides. “The air that is full of fishes. Just as though they had been born to it. I do not know how they breathe, but I think they must have learned to. A person can learn to do almost anything.”

Rush closes his eyes.

He is silent for a long time. At last he leans back against the wall and looks at her tiredly. “What happened to you?” he asks. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember; I only know that you had red hair.”

Ginn swallows down on the raft at the crest of its hot wave. She shakes her head mutely. “Nothing,” she whispers. “Nothing.”

They look at each other across the length of the room.

Slowly, Rush bends and retrieves the dictionary from the floor. He holds it as though he is unfamiliar with a dictionary’s form and function, then extends it haltingly to Ginn. “This is shit,” he says. “The OED is better.”

Ginn takes the book. “Chloe gifted it me,” she says. “I believe her intent to have been insulting.”

“Ah,” Rush says.

“She wished me to know this word, _soapopera._ ”

“Christ.”

“I have learned the word _heliophagous_ instead _._ ”

“Widely useful, that one.”

Ginn says, “I expect it will be.”

There follows a silence.

Rush passes a hand upon his face, looking tired. “I need the ciphertext,” he says. “Have you got it?”

Ginn says, “I wish to perform an EEG.”

“You don’t have a machine,” Rush says.

“How does a person acquire one? Does it cost many monies?”

“Probably. Possibly. I don’t really know.”

“If I arrange such a test,” Ginn says, “you will allow it?”

Rush looks at her long-sides. “Have you got the ciphertext?” he asks again.

Stiff with reluctance, Ginn nods. The nine-cipher set is stored upon her computer. She had located it while enabling the computer to comply with the internet protocols. She supposes that Telford had intended her to collapse the last cipher, eventually. Insofar as he had possessed a plan.

“And you’ll let me see it?”

“Foremost the EEG,” she says.

Rush appears equally stiff with reluctance. However, he roughly inclines his head.

“Good,” Ginn says.

They stand in silence once more, regarding one another.

“Who is _Young?_ ” Rush asks after a moment.

Ginn bites her lip.

She could say, perhaps, that she does not really know. This would not be an untruth. She had not known Young— not enough for Telford’s revelsions to cause her pain. She thinks that Young had made a point to not know her, for he was soldier caste, with all the habitudes that meant. He had of her the fear that she might hurt him, or that, more likely, in time he would hurt her. One keeps a pact with the people that one destroys: we are both men, so I will pretend that you are not a man, and you will do the same, so that we may remain men together. She knows, though she is not soldier caste. But Rush had not known these rules, and Young had not enforced them. Perhaps he had thought to find another way to be a man. But all the time, he had been undoing his own doings, unbeing himself by what he planned to do to Rush.

“He is no one,” she says. “An officer at the mountain. It is not important. You should rest.” When he makes a disgusted sound, she adds: “The seizures enweary you.”

“I’m not tired,” Rush says. This is evidently a falsification. His eyes are heavy with their lash-loads, and his hands shake. He has not attended the cigarette-end burning out between two fingers. Ginn thinks he is not aware of it.

“Rest,” she says. “It will provide you refocillation.”

Rush endows her with a weary laugh. “Is that another of your new words?”

“Yes. Is it not correct?”

He crosses the room and makes a seat on the edge of the couch, entombing the weight of his head in his hands. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know if anything will provide me refocillation.”

Ginn makes her own seat next to him, carefully, without touching. She balances the tome of the book in her lap. “A person can learn to do anything,” she says. “Even, perhaps, be refocillated.”

Rush shakes his head. He reaches out to the lamp-table and deposits his cigarette, flecked with black ashes, into a half-drunk coffee cup. The air enriches with the scent of burning. It reminds Ginn of something from her childhood, a kind of sacrifice. There had been many sacrifices mandated by the religion of her fathers. She does not now remember all of their purposes. She had grown to associate the odor with awe and dread, emotions that now shadow her for a moment. She wishes that she could remember, she thinks. She wishes that she could remember the sacrifices. She alone has no way to mark the tectonic plates that seem to move around her, like vast ships docking and undocking, adrift in the vacuum of space. She has no way to hasten or effect the motion. She is a small animal clinging to something large and interlocking, striving to stay one step always in front of its gears. Even now that she is the other Ginn, she feels this.

Rush subsides against the back of the couch with a sigh that is soundless. When Ginn glances at him, she finds his eyes are closed. His lashes make ink-marks against the blue stain of his cheekbones. The lights of the transmitters flicker at the sides of his head, as though they do not sleep. As though _he_ does not sleep— even when he is sleeping.

She lays her own head against the tufted couch-back and gazes at him. “I must believe it,” she says softly— speaking to herself. “I must believe that we can.”

* * *

Later, Chloe enters the room carrying a wine glass. Ginn is capable to identify it a wine glass because Chloe has said this is its name. Chloe drinks from this glass often, when she is affecting an imposture that Ginn does not understand. Always she lifts her chin into the air a little more than is typical, leaning against an article of furniture with only her hip, carelessly balancing the bowl of the wine glass into the palm of one hand and causing the wine to move in a centrifugal fashion.

She does so now, proxying the wall for a furniture item, and gazes at the couch where Rush is sleeping. Ginn has placed a tartan blanket over him. He is of ordinary a restless sleeper; he talks in his dreams to his dead wife, addressing her by name and uttering half-sentences in the terminology of music. “It’s the _pitches_ ,” he will say. “The _pitches_. I don’t know why. He just is.” Or: “Destructive interference. I’m— Because I’m not resonant enough. The _body_.” It makes Ginn feel highly eerie, when he does this sleep-talking. It creates the impression that there is someone else in the room, an invisible figure whom Ginn is not capable to see. The idea is one in which she feels uneasy. Is the whole world, then, crissed-crossed by invisible things that emit noise at frequencies to which we don’t listen? Is the whole world crowded and never lonely? This prospect is exhausting, when she cannot tolerate the presence of even two people so much of the time. She does not wish to be touched by invisible people, or any people.

But Rush is sleeping heavily now, as though the seizure has thefted him of all his apparitions.

Chloe says nothing and drinks from her wine. At last she observes, without looking at Ginn, “My whole house smells like cigarette smoke now.”

Ginn is seated with her feet pulled up in the far armchair.She too gazes at Rush— not at Chloe. “I require a machine for EEGs,” she says.

“Um,” Chloe says.

“After great negotiation, I agreed Rush to this test.”

“Okay, but the thing is,” Chloe says, “they cost, like, twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“This is a large amount of monies?”

“Yeah.”

Ginn nods. “Then we will need to steal one.”

“Um,” Chloe says again, sounding alarmed. “We’re not _stealing_ an EEG machine.”

“Yes. I must see the energies that Rush’s brain is producing.” Ginn spreads her hands. “To work right now, it is like shooting needles in a grassland.”

Chloe’s brow creases. “Needles in a grassland?”

“Yes. So much of the grass, and hard to hit. I cannot always produce the correct needle. And—“ Ginn bites her lip. She looks down at her bare feet upon the armchair, the way that her toes grip the cushioned surface as though ready to resist their removal. “In Colorado. The transmitters. He was already— He did not like their modulation. He thought that there is nothing of him left. Already. Already; you understand? Even before—“ She does not put voice in the things that the Alliance did on their base. She thinks it is probable that she does not know all of them. Even if Rush remembered, she would not be a grudge to his choice to not utter. After all, she has not told to him all she endured. And she will tell to Chloe less, because Chloe does not know such endurance, and there are things one tells only to those who have no need for you to tell of them. Rather, she resumes: “And so— I fire into the dark, and when I strike blades of grass down, he feels I am killing even the nothing he has left. Of course he is angry. Of course he is. We cannot continue.”

Chloe holds her silence for a long time. “And you think an EEG machine will help,” she finally says.

“Yes. I don’t know. We will make no progress without it.” Ginn shakes her head. “And if we do not progress— if he pursues the cipher—“

“Right,” Chloe says. She looks at Rush again. The back of his head is visible, ruffled by the red and silver blanket. This is the emblazon of Chloe’s undergraduation, printing upon a soft rich petroleum product that Chloe had insisted upon calling _fleece._ Ginn had eyed her, uncomprehending. _But it is not fleece_ , she had said. She knows fleece; she has a memory of helping to shear the young _sot_ before the summer, burying her small hands in their clouds of dense thick curls.

She aches suddenly for the weight of a _sot_ -skin blanket. She wants to bury herself under it, smelling woodsmoke and the clean hide, making herself as small a creature as she had known how to be once, before she became Ginn of Sixth House, before she became the other Ginn. So badly, she wants to be a small furled creature under blankets, still on wait of the season when she would have to blossom, differentiating and baring her parts.

She lets her head drop back against the chair-back. “We cannot continue,” she whispers.

She feels Chloe place evaluative eyes upon her. But Chloe only says, after a great while, “We’re not going to steal an EEG machine. But maybe we could get in to use one. I have a friend who’s in med school at Georgetown; I bet they have some there.”

“Med school,” Ginn repeats. “This is the training module for ER personnel.” She has heard the term often on _General Hospital_ and _Grey’s Anatomy_.

“Yeah,” Chloe says. “I’ll call her tomorrow— and hope she picks up, I guess. It’s kind of… been a while since we talked.” She averts her gaze in a manner that suggests a desire to conceal some thought. “You’d have to leave the house, though. I mean, they don’t let you rent out medical equipment like it’s a library.”

“I don’t—“ Ginn begins automatically.

But Chloe rolls her eyes, gyrating the last of the wine in her glass and swallowing it. “If you say you don’t know what is a library, I’m going to throw something at you. You’re like a three-year-old.” The wine has inked the top edge of her lip a color like the wax paint she keeps in her cabinet— an Earth color, provocative of berry-fruits and Jell-O. Ginn cannot conceive of a personage in space wearing it.

“No,” Ginn says. “I am unlike a three-year-old. You are mistaken.”

“You are a _lot_ like a three-year-old,” Chloe says. Her tongue darts out and does laps at the stain on her lip until her skin is the color of skin again.

Ginn looks away. She feels a faint sense of loss— perhaps because she is not a three-year-old, asleep under a _sen_ -skin blanket, and never will be again, or because the wine-stain has reminded her of ink, and how it had felt to be so sure as to commit things to paper, or because this alone out of conversations with Chloe has not contained a threat of violence, and she does not know how to feel about that. And so she feels this sense of loss, because the threat is programmed foremost into her system, like the default set of a ships’ computer.

“You do not know,” she says. “You don’t know my nature.”

Once more she feels Chloe’s eyes upon her.

“No,” Chloe says. “I guess I don’t.”

* * *

_She dreams that she stands in Chloe’s bathroom. The silvered glass is liquid upon the cabinet door, so much so that it appears to move, like water. She could put her hand into it, she thinks, and perhaps touch something under the surface. Would it be the other Ginn, this secret life that shivered against the outstretched edge of her fingertips? She does not think so. She left that other Ginn behind her, trapped and almost certainly dead. They had made a sacrifice, like cutting off an arm or a foot to escape from a hunter’s trap. So what would it be?_

_She is reminded of being a child. The river. How she had held her breath, hungry to puncture the skin of the world, to as-they-say get at the bottom of its nature._

_In her dream, the sink counter is covered in elixirs: all of Chloe’s liquid crystals and powders and vitaminal serums and paints. Ginn opens them. The air comes to smell of a chemical manufactury, metallic and herbal and very clean. She picks up one of the powder cakes and dabs its soft contents onto her cheekbones. It makes her looks like she bears bruises, blue and brown. But it glitters like the ice that trails from a comet when a light-beam strikes it in the dark of deep space._

_She tilts her head this way and that, admirous of the effect. Her expression is serious; she cannot make it otherwise. “You are happy,” she tries telling her mirror-self. “You are happy; you are not half-dead anymore.” She picks up a pen, one of the blunt soft pens with the tips in different colors, and draws an unsteady smile about her mouth. The pen is bright red; her skin looks cut-open, as though she could dig her fingers under it and peel it off._

_She knows what she is doing. She is making a new Ginn. Someone she has not killed yet. Someone who will live in the mirror and hold her up._

_She meant to make someone who would smile. Who would keep smiling. But when she has completed the smile, her hand does not still. As though possessed by the pen, her hand continues. It superscribes the bones of her face: red, red, red. A skull. A mask._

_She regards herself in the mirror. She is bright red, brilliant, the most venomest of creatures._

_She is still clutching the waxy pen in her hand. She stares at the skin of her forehead, the only part of her face that is bare._

_Her people tell a tale of a great magician who raised a man of stone to life by writing a secret word in just such a place upon his body. Ginn had known the word, once upon a time. It had been told to her as a child; it was part of the story. But now she finds that she cannot remember. It is lost to her, like so many of her early thoughts._

_“Think,” she whispers harshly to herself. “Remember.”_

_Really, any word would do. She sets the pen’s soft tip upon her thin skin. Her hand trembles._

_But she cannot remember how to write._

* * *

It will partake of a week, Chloe says, to obtain EEG-machine access, so they must bite their time until then.

“I’m surprised Abby remembered who I was,” she adds, placing a plastic bowl beside the chief door and arraying it with a host of brightly-wrapped sweets. “I haven’t really— um. I haven’t spent a lot of time talking to people recently.”

Ginn watches her with a degree of fascination. Chloe has chosen this evening to be adorned in a sleek black dress with ceremonial headgear. No one in the Stargate mountain had ever worn its like. Ginn wishes to know its purpose, but she is eager to not give the implication that she possesses an interest in any particular thing that Chloe does.

“Your outfit is impractical,” she finally opts to inform Chloe. “If you wore it to battle, you would be dead.”

“Um,” Chloe says, straightening and looking down at her long skirt. “It’s a Halloween costume. I’m supposed to be a witch.”

“A witch,” Ginn echoes. She knows what is Halloween. She has seen this on television. And she has heard this word, _witch_ , but she does not know the definition. And she has never seen it portrayed with such an immensity of headgear.

“Yeah,” Chloe says. “Like— a lady with magic powers, I guess. Mostly evil, but that might just be because of the patriarchy.” She opens the door and looks out. “Just so you know, I usually get at least a few trick-or-treaters. That’s, um, kids who go from door to door asking for candy. There’ll probably be more because it’s nice tonight; it’s warmer than yesterday. I guess I could just sit out on the doorstep. That way the noise won’t bother you and Rush.”

Rush is working in the kitchen. Ginn does not know what “work” he does. She does not want to know. She is suspect that he works upon the cipher in some secret manner, although he denies her this.

“Yes,” she says. “Do not bother us. We are upon important workings.”

In truth, she has been reading the dictionary while watching an historical film about a Scotsman who lives forever, with the television placed on mute. However, her doings are more vital than Chloe’s as a general principle, so she does not feel that she has made a deceit to Chloe, or feel guilt when Chloe gives her a weary look and totes the bowl of sweets to the doorstep, closing the door behind her as she goes.

But once Chloe has gone outside the house, Ginn is conscious of her as a person who is on the outside of the house: an unseeable presence troubling the outer walls.

Ginn is as-yet unfamiliar with outside-of-the-house-ness. Since that she was a childish number of years old, she has lived in places where the outside of the house was uninhabitable, so-far-in as one can term a spaceship or a base a house. One did not adventure outside without protective layers.

Much of her recent existence would have been improved if she had kept this prohibition in mind.

She wishes that she could ask now for protective layers. A vac suit with a helmet, or even simply magnetic boots, so that she could not be made to lose her grip, and would not be collapse by pressure or bombarded by particles too small and deadly to stand-with. She cannot. Earth does not utilize such layers. The Tau’ri account themselves to possess a universal environment, one that should come naturally to everyone. But she remembers her first days of planet gravity. Her corporeal ill-suitedness, even after the initial unbalance had passed.

One of the airmen had said, _You act like you’ve never seen a sunset._

She had pressed her face to the vehicle window as they exited the mountain, just to see the on-fireness of it.

It had been as bright as the thin dense dust of an interstellar cloud.

Since, she has not attempted to see one. But she goes to the window, a little hesitantly, and touches its cover (which Chloe describes, for some reason, as being _blind_ ). There is a glow from beyond. The light is a warm color. She creates an angle of perhaps twelve degrees between the blind and the window’s edge. This reveals a slice of Earthly evening. It resembles its counterpart on the television. Light is diffusing from a sun that is low and half-hidden by houses. The air has a slightly colloidal texture, like milk in tea. She finds that she wonders what it would taste like.

When she allows the cover to drop and turns, she sees that Rush is watching her from the kitchen doorway, leaning against the solid side of the frame.

“Where’s Chloe?” he asks neutrally.

Ginn jerks her head towards the door. “Outside. It is Halloween, a celebration.”

“Yes,” Rush says. “I know it is. The pumpkins.”

“The pumpkins,” Ginn agrees. “It is a harvest celebration.”

“You could go outside as well,” Rush says. His face is very difficult to scrutinize for meaning.

Ginn shakes her head. “I will not leave you alone.”

This was not the correct response. His face twists in an expression. “Very tender. But I think we both know that your devotion to my well-being has little to do with, well, my well-being, and everything to do with providing a rational excuse for your incipient— your incipient— your— aggro— aggre—“ His jaw works. It is the same painful expression that Ginn recalls from the Stargate mountain. From the ultimatous days, when he had lost his words. “Your new agoraphobia,” he says, upon a pause that is lengthier than it should be. His eyes burn at her and challenge her to utter upon this.

She does not utter. She says only, “I do not know _agoraphobia_. And that is not true.”

“Oh, please,” Rush says cuttingly. He adjusts his spectacles and looks away from her. “I won’t be made a pretext; you’ll have to leave the fucking house at some point.”

GInn levels a hard look at him. “You are engineering to be unpleasant,” she says. “But it will not escape you the EEG.”

Rush’s mouth turns down. “Perhaps before you attempt a psychoanalytical reading, you ought to learn the English language.”

“Perhaps you ought to acquire some untranslucent machinations.”

“Go eat a fucking Mars Bar next to a fire hazard, why don’t you,” Rush says.

Ginn squares her shoulders aggressively. “The weather is cold.”

“You can have my jacket,” Rush says. “Or— Telford’s jacket, if you like. It’s heavier.”

Most of the clothing that they had brought with them had been garbaged. The jacket alone had been laundered, though Rush options his conventional outerwear over it.

“It’s just there,” Rush says, indicating. “Beside the sofa.”

And, indeed, it sits atop a neat stack of clothing. Ginn gives it a hostile look. “I—“ she begins, hugging her arms across her chest.

“Fresh air,” Rush says. His voice is not very certain about this phrase that he has uttered, _fresh air._ “It is, reputedly, a tonic.”

“I don’t know what it is a tonic.”

“It’s good for you.” Rush looks down, then crosses the room and picks up the jacket, unfolding it and holding it out to Ginn. He says, “It will provide you with refocillation.”

The corner of her mouth turns upwards at that, if only faintly. “I don’t know if anything will provide me with refocillation,” she says. But she accepts the jacket from Rush.

He exhibits the same air of almost-humor. “A little bird told me that a person can learn to do anything,” he says.

Ginn creates a bad face at him. “I am not a little bird.”

“No?” He reaches out and straightens the jacket’s edges.

“No,” Ginn says, frowning.

But she feels unaccountably pleased. And the trace of warmth lingers until long after she has stepped out into the chilly and vegetal-tasting air.

* * *

Chloe does not comment at Ginn’s appearance. She merely offers a fractional turn of her head. She is seated on the low step of the house’s front platform, the bowl of candy balanced in her lap. Her face is pale in a light that, now, is beginning to turn blue and heavy.

“I just saw a gang of kids go down the other side of the street,” she says. “So it’ll probably just be a minute before they’re here.”

Ginn does not know what to say to this. She leans uncomfortably against the door, optioning out of sitting, and crosses her arms against her chest. She is conscious of the weight of the jacket, and of its chemical-sweet laundry odor, so different from when it had smelled of electricity and blood. Even estranged from her in this manner, it offers some small comfort: it is over-large to an extent that she wears it like a fortress.

“I used to go trick-or-treating at the state capitol in Virginia,” Chloe says after a pause. She has turned back from Ginn to face outwards. “My dad would take me. I’d go door-to-door at all the state senators’ offices with all the other awful little political brats.”

Ginn does not know what to say to this, either. She does not know what is a political brat.

Chloe removes her headgear and holds it between her hands, turning its black frame in slow circles. “My dad died,” she says at last. “Not that long ago. That’s why— I know this sounds stupid to you, and you’re probably going to be kind of a bitch about it, so, I mean, I’m saying that so you can skip the being-a-bitch part— I’ve kind of been having a hard time. I guess. That’s why I haven’t talked to Abby.”

“The girl with the EEG-machine.”

“Yeah.” Chloe continues her headgear-turning. “I thought that maybe she was going to be mad. Because I ghosted her.”

“You ghosted her?”

“I stopped talking to her. I didn’t return her calls. It’s what people say. It means I, like, turned into a ghost?”

“No. You are not a ghost. You are an ordinary human person.”

“I _know_.” Chloe sounds exasperated. “It’s what people say. Like I said, you don’t have to be a bitch about it. I know how stupid and ordinary I am to you.”

“Yes,” Ginn says without repentance.

Chloe huffs a frustrated breath out. “God. I don’t even known why I bother,” she says. “You’re just— and for _Abby_ , it’s the opposite; all she talks about is med school, and this guy she’s dating, and do I want to go to a movie, and that’s why I couldn’t talk to her about it. Because my dad got shot by _space_ mercenaries in a fucking _stairwell_ , and I couldn’t tell anyone; I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement with the government; and now _you’re_ here, and Dr. Rush— and Abby’s like, Oh, we have to do brunch, if you come over early, we might be able to hit the campus and still make it to bottomless mimosas at Clyde’s! And I just can’t— you know— but then I think, I’ve sort of _got_ to, because in three weeks or three months or whenever, that’s going to be who I am. Another intern whose idea of _important_ is what time Clyde’s stops serving bottomless mimosas. So, you know, maybe you could _fuck off_ a little bit, because this is my life, it’s supposed to be my _life.”_

Ginn, back-took, does not respond at once. There is a silence. Across the street, a child shrieks as though it is in imminent danger, though Ginn does not believe that it is. It is play-acting. The children of Earth are always only play-acting.

When the expected aftermath of distant laughter is carried in on the colloid air, she rolls her hands into her fists.

What she feels is carried in her hands, she thinks. That is a good place for it: where she cannot, in fact, feel it.

“I do not know what is a mimosa,” she says flatly, at last.

“I _know!_ ” Chloe says, her voice rising. “I _know_ you don’t. Okay? _God._ ” Abruptly she seizes the brim of the headgear and hurls it out across the house’s small proximal pasture. It floats a remarkable distance, black against the smoky light, and descends.

Ginn watches it. “The headgear was not,” she says, after a pause, “a requisite element in the celebrations?”

Chloe says nothing. She hunches her shoulders and adjusts her posture so that her back is presented squarely to Ginn.

A party of children rustles past, clad in shapeless white garments that cover their faces and the tops of their heads. Only their eyes are visible. This is supposed to represent a ghost costume. Ginn does not know why. It is so featureless. In her experience, ghosts have features. It is the very specificity of them that renders them the ghost of something. If they had no features, then they would be only a nothingness. Is this more scary, or less? She is not certain.

She watches the children, their unconcealed hands in the darkness, the glints of their eyes where they do not successfully pretend that they are not alive beneath the mask of nonexistence. At the end of the night they will strip off their ghostliness and go among the living, as careless as they are even now, with their swinging gourds and their bootlaces, confident that they are unsusceptible to the sickness of being ghost-like. Ginn experiences the urge to upset the gourds and tear the sheets back, exposing them for the well-fed animals they are. But she feels as though her hands would pass right through them. She is the ghost that they are not. Someone has ghosted her.

* * *

Chloe’s friend, Abby Tolliver, transpires to be a green-jumpered person of buoyant affect who possesses hair that intermixes the colors of brown and gold. Ginn has never before witnessed such an intermixing, and very much wishes that she could inspect the individual strands. How does genetics allot the number of hairs of each color? Why does the gold color not extend to the root? She suspects, however, that such an inspection would be strongly stigmatized by Chloe, and so confines herself to standing in resentful silence until called upon to perform the mandated shaking of hands.

She had left the house, blinking under a strange blaze of sunshine that did not seem to warm the air. She wishes that she had not. She does not like the Earth. It is too full of movement. It is too full of moving parts. Everything in it is unnecessarily an ecosystem. It is filled with birds and trees and insects and breezes. It is open to asteroids. At any moment, one could appear.

Rush too seems anxious, for all that he had taunted her. (She has utilized her dictionary to define _agoraphobia_ , and now knows what it is.) He shifts from one foot to the other in his canvas boots, hugging his elbows.

“I can’t believe your department won’t help fund your research,” Abby Tolliver says to Rush, pushing one end of her berry-colored scarf back over her shoulder and setting off at a bounce down the sidewalk. “I mean, you hear about this kind of stuff, and obviously, like, I can’t talk, since professional degrees are probably stealing all of the sciences’ grants, and obviously a liberal arts college like Sarah Lawrence isn’t going to be able to just drop twenty-five gs on medical equipment, but—“

Rush says in a clipped voice, “I’m pursuing a rather avant-garde angle of study.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of what Chloe said.” Abby Tolliver maneuvers between tree-trunks with deftness, pursuing a red stone palace with a sweep of stairs. It does not look like Colorado. “I’m hoping to go into neuroscience, so just— if you get any good results, it would be amazing if you just put my name in the acknowledgements.”

“He will,” Chloe says quickly. “Of course he will.”

Ginn stops at the foot of the stairs and stares up at the building. She is, for a moment, made sick by the complexities of its colors; by its scale, the sky, the gravitational suck of the Earth. Birds enbobble their heads and disturb her sense of proportion. Her feet are stuck on the pavement. She feels she cannot move.

Chloe jostles against her elbow. “Come on,” she whispers fiercely. “Keep walking. Don’t act weird.”

Ginn glares at her. But already, Chloe is leveraging her up the steps of the building, allowing her no time to rebut. Chloe’s hand is a warm vise pinching into the flesh on her arm. It produces a pain that distracts from the manifold strangenesses of her surroundings, loosing her from the fizzing circuit of her panic and, in so doing, feeling almost, in factuality, nothing like pain at all.

* * *

To be in a small room outfitted with medical equipment, containing a bed on which a person is designed to lie down; to see the long entangled electric cables that can measure the waves of a man’s brain; to attune to the faint smell of heated plastic, and other unnamed antiseptic scents—

Ginn had not considered what the feeling would be.

She stands clutching her computer to her chest, afflicted by a vertiginous rotation. A high-pitched tone sings her inner ears.

Rush too has stopped in the doorway. He has not entered the room. He is posed very still, staring at the bed. One hand encloses the wrist of the other, as though he is enacting his own restraints. “No,“ he says in a tranced voice, empty and lacking affect, like one who reads from unfamiliar words upon a page. “No. I think I—“

The air begins to hum with an invisible yet dark electricity. Ginn feels it crawl along her skin; feels the small hairs on her arms stand with it. The light dims. The filament of its bulb gleams in the shadows, golden.

“Rush,” she says unsteadily. “It is not what you remember.”

“I don’t remember anything,” Rush says. He is staring straight ahead, with an appearance of unseeing. Slowly he reaches out and touches a hand to the doorframe. Some mechanical element of the building-wall creaks. The golden filament of the lightbulb pulses like a picture of a fish from the undersea. Ginn has seen such fishes in nature programs. They are self-illuminating, their own discrete circuits, delicate and filled with many teeth.

“It is Earth,” Ginn says, attempting to summon more strongness. “It is _Earth_. Washington, DC. Not the lab.”

Rush raises his haunted eyes to her. “Gloria doesn’t want to be here,” he whispers.

Ginn feels such a wave of despairing soak her that she fears she will sink. She cannot speak for a moment. She is on the base. She smells of blood. Her chest is burning. She is wearing Simeon’s leather shirt. But she is not. And when she was, she was not despairing. She has a foot in each era of her lifespan. The line of time-passing is drawn down her chest. She struggles to remember this and demarcate it. She is not there, and Rush is not. She must locate him, and herself.

“Chloe!” she forces out, upraising her voice in a manner that is strident but certainly, certainly, surely lacking panic. “Chloe Armstrong!”

Chloe appears behind Rush’s shoulder, her eyebrows rising in her startled face. She is wearing a lavender long-shirt. She is wearing a jewel called a _pearl_ around her neck. It is made of a piece of debris with accretions. Ginn does not understand its appealing. Only a Tau’ri person would desire to wear a piece of accreted-upon ocean debris.

“Hi,” Chloe says uncertainly. It is a low word, very ordinary. “I was just saying bye to Abby. I figured we probably didn’t want her sticking around. What’s wrong?”

The light in the room rewarms a little. But Rush looks at Chloe with eyes that are— a new word— _spooked_. The dictionary term of ghost-eyes. “Nothing,” he says, breathing hard.

This is a lie, a typical Rush-lie. But at a least, he is not talking to Gloria any longer. And Ginn can perceive that he does not wish to discuss the matter with Chloe.

“…Nothing,” Ginn affirms loyally, a beat late. And then— “There is no _we_ , Chloe Armstrong.”

Chloe does not regard her. She touches Rush on the higher arm. “Hey,” she says. “It’s just Georgetown. You’re on Earth. Not— wherever that place was.”

“I know where the hell I am!” Rush snaps, agitated. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what _she’s_ talking about.” He jerks his head towards Ginn. “I just— feel ill. I feel ill. Your French press makes shit coffee.”

Chloe had acquired a novel coffeemaker. It is from France. She had refused the spending of more than fifty of dollars because, she said, Rush is only going to break this one as well; she can tell; she knows it. Fifty of dollars is not an adequate price for a coffeemaker. Rush has discoursed at length about this.

“Okay, well,” Chloe says, “one, it’s not polite to trash-talk other people’s kitchen gadgets if those people are letting you live with them, and two, I’ll get a new coffeemaker when you stop breaking things with your mind, which, judging by the noise that light fixture’s making, is something that hasn’t yet happened.”

Rush glares at her, proportionally more annoyed now than fearful. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a fucking child,” he says.

The light self-regulates. The atmosphere of the room reacquires homeostasis.

Chloe steps over the threshold and closes the door. “I know you’re not a child,” she says. “You’re more like a grumpy nuclear bomb. This is a really bad idea, by the way.”

“No,” Ginn says. “It is not a bad idea.” She sits in a chair and unenfolds her laptop, attempting not to reveal that she is shaky with too many held breaths. “Please participate in placing the leads on him.”

“Um—“ Chloe looks at Rush. “You realize I have _no_ medical training, right? As I've tried to emphasize?”

“Then perhaps you should go away,” Ginn says— more forcefully, it is possible, than she had intended.

“You literally _just_ called me in here,” Chloe says. She looks put-up. A small flush is rising on her cheekbones.

“Yes. However, now you do not have a use.”

Chloe emits a high-pitched, scornful sound. “I’m the one who got you into this building!”

“No. Abby Tolliver.” Ginn does not look up from her computer screen.

Chloe emits a louder sound. “You know, I could get you thrown out again. It would be _easy_. Also, you’re living in my _house._ If—“

“You are causing a distraction,” Ginn cuts her speech off. “If you have nothing of substance to contribute, then you will please cease to—“

“Ginn.”

Rush’s voice startles her, and she looks up. He utters her name so rarely.

He is standing beside the medical table with the machine-leads in his hands. Slowly, he presses one to a temple, and then another: peeling off the paper backs and affixing the adhesive. He parts his straggled hair with his fingers and feels for the points where each lead must be buried. His eyes seek Ginn’s, skittish and worried.

The position of every lead that he assigns is correct.

“Yes,” Ginn says, post-pause. “Exactly so. Thank you.”

“I haven’t done this before,” Rush says. His voice is hunted. “I don’t like doctors. I would never— I wouldn’t _let_ someone just go about attaching wires to my head.”

“You were unconscious,” Ginn says. “The first time.”

“The _first_ time?” His fingers close around the line of an electrode, white at the knuckles, as though he is clinging to a tether line. “I know where they go. My… _hands_. My hands remember. My head remembers what they felt like.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Chloe says softly.

“Don’t worry about it,” Rush repeats, flat. He unfolds his hand in front of his face. He stares at it. “As though I’m a guest,” he says. “In someone else’s body.”

Chloe searches for his eye. “You aren’t,” she says firmly. She reaches out and grips her hand around his hand, a thing that Ginn would never do, for Rush does not embrace it. He does not like to be subject to other personages’ touch. But the touch of Chloe he permits. “We don’t have to do this,” Chloe tells him.

Ginn stabs savagely at a laptop key with a finger. “We _do_ ,” she says. “We _do_ have to. Please activate the power in the machinery.”

A silent communique seems to transmit between Chloe and Rush. Ginn wishes to block or intercept it. But no doubt its language is a Tau’ri language, highly colloquial; one that she would not understand, one that she does not have a mastery of. The idea causes her to feel a height of agitation. It occurs to her to wonder for the first time, for no particular reason, how many extraterrestrials inhabitate the Earth, and if any of them are within the vicinity of Washington DC, and whether they too find themselves unfluent in languages that their training did not cover, languages that they perhaps would have had to be born on Earth to know. An inheritance of word and gesture, lost to her forever. Do the covert alien infiltrators of the Earth wish, as she does, to reverse time’s mechanisms and resolve themselves into new bodies so that they would have the chance to learn— the chance thusly to make known the items that ache within the furthest parts of limbs for expression, but can find no conduit beyond the self to the other that is not like it?

She wonders. She wonders.

Rush nods.

Chloe sighs. She releases Rush’s hand and pushes her hair back. “Fine. But I’m doing this against my better judgement,” she says.

* * *

“Remember me the moment when first you learned of the stargate,” Ginn says. “Can you?”

Rush lies with his back against the bed. His hand is flung across his eyes; over the course of answering her initial machine-calibration questions, he has removed his glasses. “Muir Beach,” he murmurs. “There were heaps of agates in the water. Moonstones. The sea brings them up, there. The air smelled like burning. The sea was on fire— no. That was— later. Not the sea. The mountains. The mountains were burning.”

“Who told you about the stargate?”

He frowns. “I’ve always known about the stargate. Haven’t I?”

“Try to remember.”

A lengthy pause. “I don’t know.”

“He gave you a jacket,” Ginn says. “You remember the jacket. We have discussed it.”

Rush screws his eyes shut. “He hasn’t got a name any longer. He tore his name off.”

“Do you remember when he told you about the stargate?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Rush presses the heels of his hands to the sides of his head. “It gives me a headache. Can we talk about something else, please?”

Ginn darts a quick glance at the EEG machine. “What of your first journey through the stargate? Can you remember?”

“I could hear something,” Rush whispers. “In the wormhole.”

“Who was your accompaniment? What was your mission?”

Restlessly, Rush shakes his head. “Like a lock turning. There was a sound. It _wanted_ to me to unlock it. The ciphers. It still wants that.”

“Do not think about the ciphers.”

“There was a courtyard. There was music. Music. It didn’t… _fit_ inside my head. But it could. It _could._ I can almost hear it. If I—”

“Glasgow,” Ginn cuts him off quickly. “Think of Glasgow. You were a child there. Narrate your childhood.”

Rush flinches, turning his head to press it against the paper pillow. “No. Why?”

“I have taken the measurements of the prior memory. We must move on.”

Rush makes a dissatisfied sound. He appears feverish, his hair beginning to affix itself to his forehead with the very faint dampness of sweat. “There was a city,” he says indistinctly. “A city. They were never supposed to be separated. It spoke, but I couldn’t understand it. Not _yet._ It was out of tune.”

“Please, you must not think about the city,” Ginn says.

The waves of his brain are beginning to align in overlapping synchronous activity. Alarming spikes have appeared on his EEG. Her fingertips fly across the keyboard, attempting to contain the incipient seizure with interference.

“Oh, Christ,” Rush says, digging his fingertips into his hair. “ _Stop_. Stop. I’m not a piece of fucking soft— a piece of fucking soft— soft— soft—“ He makes an strangled sound. “It’s _mine._ I won’t let you take it away!”

“It is _hurting_ you,” Ginn says.

“Stop,” Chloe says, leaning forwards and catching at Ginn’s arm.

Ginn flings her off in a sharp jerk. “Do not touch me!”

“We were never supposed to be _separated_ ,” Rush says. His eyes remain clenched shut. His voice is thin and ragged. “You can’t take it away. That’s why the mountains were burning. Isn’t it? I can’t remember if I— I don’t _think_ I— But one has to be careful, with cigarette-ends, and after all, I burnt all the boxes. Or— no. I only wanted them burnt. I think. Because you wouldn’t let me _listen._ ” A dark strand of hair sticks against his cheek in a wet spiral. “If I could just _listen_ , then I wouldn’t have to be something _separate._ I wouldn’t have to _burn_ the—“

“He’s going to have a seizure,” Chloe says sharply, piercing Ginn with gazes. “You have to do something.”

“I’m _trying_ ,” Ginn says.

The EEG is not resolving. She cannot contain the amplitude of Rush’s brain-waves.

A smell of burning starts to fill the room.

“If you can’t fix it, then _stop_ ,” Chloe says, her voice arising. “Stop messing with him!”

“It is unfeasible to simply stop _,”_ Ginn snaps. “I am not causing the disorder; I am _managing_ it. If I cease, he will certainly seizure.”

A sound of alarm begins to emit from the EEG machinery. When Ginn diverts her glance to it, she sees that one of its plastic cables appears to be fusing to the central apparatus.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Chloe says. She upraises from her chair and goes to Rush, taking hold of his hands against his resistance where they are locked against his temples. “Dr. Rush,” she says. “It’s Chloe. Listen to me. I’ll buy you a new coffeemaker. Okay? A really good one. A really good coffeemaker. But you have to tell me what kind. What kind of coffeemaker do you want me to get?”

Rush stares at her, face twisting in uncertainty. “…A coffeemaker,” he says, sounding lost.

“Yes. A coffeemaker. To replace the one you broke. I’ll buy you one, but I don’t know what kind. Not French press, and I’m guessing that a Chemex isn’t going to be expensive enough, or Aeropress either, because I kind of think you’re just mostly being a snob, but we could get an espresso maker, maybe, a really expensive one, one of the ones that have a built-in grinder; would that be okay? A built-in grinder?”

In the face of this barrage of words, Rush seems to struggle briefly before something within him finally relents.

Ginn makes a number of swift adjustments to the interference outputs. “He is moving closer to containable values.”

Chloe tells Rush, “You have to promise not to break it, though. I’m not actually made out of money, which, you kind of act like I am. I mean, I do have a lot of money, I guess, but I’m not really supposed to say that? And I’m still going to be annoyed if you break a, like, eight-hundred-dollar espresso machine, because that’s just wasteful.”

Rush blinks up at her. “I had…” he says, sounding dazed. “I had a coffee machine. Someone had a coffee machine. Didn’t he? Have I lost it? I seem to lose everything these days… Careless of me.”

“That’s okay,” Chloe says, squeezing at his hands. “We’ll get it back.”

Ginn observes the melted cable of the machinery, the plastic box that has stopped alarming and now displays a haphazard set of numbers, in some places layered on one another. She looks down at her computer screen.

What she is seeing suggests that the transmitters will continue to effect a maintenance of Rush’s functional neural state so long as he does not exceed certain parameters, past which the transmitters are not capable of producing a sufficient amplitude of electromagnetic action.

Unfortunately, Rush is now adequate to exceed these parameters, and does so without effort when his thinking of the Ancient ciphers and their music reaches its peak. She cannot stop it. She would have to redesign the transmitters, and she does not possess the materials necessary to do this. She suspects that no one on Earth possesses the materials— no one on Earth outside of the Stargate mountain. She is not certain that such materials even exist.

 _I did this to him_ , she thinks. She has so much memory of sitting in this position, altering the transmitters, her hands resting upon the black laptop keys. Amplifying his brain waves. Encouraging the abnormalities, so that she and Rush might escape. She had done what Kiva wanted, and she had done more than Kiva wanted. More than Kiva knew to ask. She had done it for herself. She had been confident that all things could be backtracked. But she had known at the similar time that they could not, that there was a line past which a mark could not be erased.

She averts her head from the sight of Rush raising to his elbows as Chloe supports him. They are talking of coffeemakers still. Coffeemakers and dollars. Ginn does not know of coffeemakers. She does not know their cost. She knows only that fifty of dollars is not sufficient. This fact alone will not make conversation. It is not substantial enough to break a seizure and remember Rush that there exists an Earth for him still, beyond his Ancient music. There is nothing she offers that will remember him this.

In such a moment she wishes for Telford’s jacket, which could conceal her outline— the traitor body with which she goes about as though she deserves to be in this world. She can comprehend his impulse to tear apart his name and his badge off. She comprehends much about him. He had known this, she thinks; he had known her transgression, when it was a thing that she herself did not know. He had said, but she had not listened, and he had washed her off his hands, for he had been hopeful in her, but also pragmatic, in the end.

“…Ginn?” Chloe says. She is nearer to Ginn than she had been.

“What,” Ginn says dully.

“I think we should maybe try to leave really quietly, before anyone notices that we kind of broke the EEG. If they can’t prove it was us, they might blame a technician or something.”

“Fine.” Ginn closes her computer and stands.

“I hope you at least figured something out,” Chloe says. “I hope it was worth it.”

Ginn faces the door. “Yes,” she says. “I figured something out.”

* * *

To exit the casualty building, they must pass through a zone that Chloe describes as the “Neurology Wings,” though no bird-animal is in sight. Many incongruous antechambers occupy these wings, which Chloe explains are for personages who have suffered from brain injuries. Like Rush, Ginn thinks but does not say. There are many examples of piece-games in these rooms, and magazines of brightly colored papers; there are televisions and libraries and painted walls.

Rush, groggy and silent, shows little interest in the surroundings. It is only when they are near the exit that he finally halts, stilling himself in the open entrance to a room like a mess hall, with many multiples of tables and chairs.

“What is it?” Ginn asks.

Chloe says, “Oh— I don’t think that’s a good idea, actually.”

Her brow has made a furrow. She is looking across the room, at a furniture adorned with a spread of striped buttons that Ginn recognizes, belatedly, as piano keys.

“No,” Ginn says at once.

“I know how to play it,” Rush murmurs. His eyes have unfocused slightly. “I do. I know how. Gloria— she wanted me to learn.”

“Gloria is not here,” Ginn says.

“She said… there are things that the listener doesn’t know to listen for. Things that the listener can’t understand. She said… I can’t describe it; you won’t understand until you’ve done it, and then you’ll see… you’ll know that you are only now at the beginning of what  _can_ be understood.”

With an unsteady lurch, he moves towards the piano.

Chloe catches at his hand, without effect. “Dr. Rush. Dr. Rush, we have to go,” she says.

Rush does not heed her.

“It isn’t enough to listen,” he murmurs, staring at the piano. At his sides, the fingers of his limp hands flex. “You have to actually—“

Ginn should, she thinks, move very swiftly to stop him. She ought to tackle him to the floor. But she is paralyzed by her fear of what she has already done. She made a mistake. She wrote a mark, and could not erase it. And so she does not know any longer what to do. Every touch leaves a scar; it tears open the world around it. She feels encasted in glass and subject to indictment. Perhaps, if only she does not move, this will solute the problem. The Earth will still, the galaxies unalter.

And so she holds herself immobile as Rush wends his way through the room; as he reaches out to touch the piano hesitantly with one finger; as he produces the first note. It is wavering and untuneful. Rush tilts his head in concentration.

“It’s not even in tune,” Chloe says, pleading. “It sounds awful. Listen to it. Let’s just go!”

But Rush does not go. He takes a seat upon the piano chair, his movements not slow and vague any longer, but formal and crisp and concentrated and clean. His hands hesitate in the air for a moment like strange insects attempting to sense polar currents, or invertebrate sea stars unused to the atmosphere of land. Then his blindly cognoscing fingertips reconnoiter the keyboard, settling into confident positions.

“I _am_ listening to it,” Rush whispers. 

A pause amplifies the barometric pressure. The air cracks with the energy of an imminent lightning-storm.

Rush's head is bent and crooked over the instrument. His expression is not visible.

He begins to play.


	47. Fugue, Pt. 3: D

**DAY ONE**

 

Davis leaned across the table and pressed a button on the tape recorder.

“This is Lieutenant Colonel Paul Davis,” he said, “of Homeworld Command. The date is November 2, 2008. I am acting to facilitate the mnemonic reconstruction of Colonel Everett Young. For security purposes, I’ll refrain from identifying any other personnel who are present in the room.”

It was a real tape recorder, which Young marveled at briefly. He hadn’t known that they still made tape recorders anymore.

He hadn’t known that it was November, either.

The last time they’d let him out onto the mountain, there had been a crust of ice under his boots. It had broken like glass, and he had felt like a clumsy giant. He’d been surprised; he’d forgotten that his body had mass and weight.

Across the table, Camile Wray was wearing a silver dragonfly pin on her lapel. It had little chips of emerald for eyes, the only color in the room. Young found himself staring at them as though they were real eyes and could see him. There wasn’t any point in looking at Wray, Davis, or the NID agent; he felt. The dragonfly alone was in sympathy with him, the only creature capable of looking back.

“Unless there are any objections,” Davis said, “I’d like to propose that we get started.”

He looked from left to right: at Wray and at the NID agent; then at Young. It took Young a long time to understand that Davis was asking if he had any objections. He couldn’t imagine what kind of difference it would make if he did. He was just a body, really; a bunch of limbs in a uniform. They could do what they liked to him.

“I have no objections,” he said.

His voice sounded rusty. He cleared his throat.

Davis said, “Then let’s begin.”

* * *

_“You’ll have to be careful,” Jackson says. “During the reconstruction process. What you think about. If you— I mean—“ He looks down and adjusts his glasses. He seems like he’s examining and discarding words, not finding adequate specimens. “It would be easy for them to get the wrong idea about you and Colonel Telford,” he says at last._

_Young’s eyes are closed. He lies prostrate on the narrow cot that he’s come to think of, without qualification, as his bed. “I know,” he says._

_“Have you had any kind of training?”_  

_“You mean resisting telepathic assault? Of course. They keep thinking it’ll be effective against brainwashing, but it never is.”_

_“So you know how to—“_

_Young cuts him off. “I know how to build a fucking mind palace, or whatever.”_

_“Good,” Jackson says. “Because that’s what you should do. You should do it now. You should start now, I mean. Quarantine any memories that might— any memories that are—“_

_Young takes pity on him eventually. “Right,” he says. “I know what you mean.”_

_“The reconstruction procedure operates on the top level of your mind. Metacognition. That means you can remember, as long as you keep yourself from being_ aware _that you’re remembering. Don’t describe what you’re remembering. Don’t think about it. You should think about nothing.”_

_“Great,” Young says. “Very helpful. Think about nothing.”_

_“What I mean is— if you’ve successfully trained yourself to quarantine those memories, then they shouldn’t register. It won’t affect the success of the process.”_

_Young stares at the gray ceiling. “Yeah,” he says. “I got it.”_

_Jackson blinks unhappily at him. “It’s not that I think you should have to do this. I think you_ shouldn’t _have to do this.”_

_“What do you want, a boy scout badge for enlightenment?” Young considers, and then rejects, the idea of turning onto his side, away from Jackson. He folds one arm around his head, like a shield, instead. He says, “I think I should have to do this.”_

_Jackson frowns, not seeming to understand the statement. His mouth looks sulky. “I’m not trying to score enlightenment points,” he says. “Is that really—“_

_“I knew the rules,” Young says, “when I joined up. Outside the service— fuck it. I’m all for letting people do what they want. Who they want. But airmen, soldiers, they can’t afford to think like that. Are they_ fuckable. _Are their_ friends _fuckable. How they can protect the person they want to fuck."_  

_By now, Jackson’s lips have regressed to a thin line. “You realize, of course, that there are female airmen. One of them is technically your boss.”_

_Young huffs out a breath in disagreement. “That’s a totally separate issue.”_

_“Is it?”_

_“Women are—“ Young considers the ceiling once more. A possibility occurs to him: that he doesn’t know what women are. That any serious effort to find out would be, in some way he shies away from comprehending, essentially connected to the dark current of undersea desire in him. He would have to dip his toes back into the water. He would have to measure its depth. “A man can want a woman,” is what he finally says, “and there’s a…_ channel _for it. Like a pipe running underground. Lined with titanium. Absolutely contained. A man and a man… it’s like you’ve sprung a leak. You see the problem?”_  

_Mutely, Jackson shakes his head._

  _“It’s proof that you’ve got no armor. Everybody sees it; everybody knows that they could stick a pin in you.” Young spreads one hand, a gesture that says: isn’t it obvious?_

_It isn’t obvious, though, maybe, because Jackson says, “I think that’s sad. I think that’s a really sad way to think about things.”_

_“Yeah, well, sorry if I’m not a bundle of laughs.” Young does turn, then, slightly away from Jackson, drawing his knees up to his chest. He stares at the dark cinderblock wall that he faces. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Anyway. Whether or not I agree with it. All that matters is that this is how it is.”_

_He thinks that maybe Jackson’s left, after that, because he doesn’t hear anything for a long time. Then, finally, Jackson says, “I’m sorry.”_

_“I don’t want you to be sorry.” Unseen, Young clenches his fist. “I don’t want anything from you. You get it? I don’t want anything. Anything.”_

* * *

The machine they were using required a Tok’ra memory device to be stuck on the side of his head, behind his ear, while a set of thick transparent lenses, a little like a pair of safety glasses, monitored his eye movement. All the data it got from him was fed back to a computer that his three interrogators were watching, where— presumably— it was translated into some kind of data on the screen. Young couldn’t picture what kind of data that might be; he’d never seen the Tok’ra use one of their za’tarc detectors, and this, anyway, was some new kind of Earth version, updated to catch the Lucian Alliance’s infiltration. So he didn’t know what the data looked like; he only knew enough to make him uneasy.

But in the end, he didn’t have it in him to worry overmuch about his thoughts.

“If you could describe an event from the last week or so,” Davis said, his eyes glued to the computer. “Something that you remember clearly; anything that comes to mind.”

Young stared at the dragonfly pin. The heavy glasses were already giving him a headache. He didn’t know how to explain to Davis how little of the last week felt clear or real, much less worth remembering. Trying to dredge something up from his brain, most of the time these days, felt like trying to build a fighter jet with Lincoln Logs. “Um,” he said.

Davis said, “This is just for calibration purposes. The content doesn’t matter. It can be anything.”

Young closed his eyes and took a breath. “I—“ he said. “They— “ He cleared his throat again. “They took me up to the surface last— It was a few days ago. I guess I don’t really know how long ago. It must have been the south side of the mountain. I could tell from the light, and someone was burning something, dead wood or leaves, down further south. I couldn’t see the smoke, but I could smell it. I can’t smell anything in the cell they’ve got me in. I think it’s supposed to be— antiseptic, or something. But it just reminds me of being in space. Locked in a big tin can, floating in the dark, and you know that if somebody broke a seal you’d be ripped apart by the pressure in about thirty seconds flat. Like those guys in the oil rig, you know— that’s how they know what it’d be like. Because that’s what it’s like underwater, if you go deep enough.”

There was a silence.

“You’re saying you feel like you’re under a lot of pressure,” Davis said. 

Young said, “This isn’t a therapy session.”

He opened his eyes. The little emeralds glinted at him. Wray was watching him neutrally from above them, but he avoided her gaze.

“Well,” Davis said. He seemed to be at a loss. But maybe he was giving that impression on purpose; maybe it was part of his play. It was hard to know, with intelligence types. He said, “Is there a memory that you know is compromised, one that we can use to set the opposite baseline?” 

“Why don’t I just start at the beginning,” Young said.

* * *

_He structures the inside of his mind like a military installation. In fact, he structures it like the Mountain: with layers and layers of hallways underground, down in the sheltering earth where no one can see or hear or do any violence against them. It’s the Mountain, but there are no people in it. Just him, wandering the naked and resonant hallways. It’s weirdly peaceful, actually, getting to wander the building without everybody’s eyes on him. He could do anything, he realizes. He could go wherever he liked, into whatever forbidden spaces. He could slam the doors, jump just when the elevator locks into place, run up and down the stairs like a kid._

_He doesn’t, mostly. But he knows he could._

_That’s what makes him feel like his memories are safe here, even more than the fact that they’re twenty-odd floors under the earth._

_He locks them up in separate rooms: the things that come to mind, the things that he thinks of. The things that don’t make a difference, the things that he knows he won’t need._

_He imagines him standing outside each locked door when he’s finished, pressing his palm up against its metal and glass._

_Whatever’s inside feels warm. It feels like it’s waiting._

* * *

“Colonel Telford had spent about a year working undercover in the Lucian Alliance’s Sixth House. This was before the attack on P2S-569; they pulled him out after that. There were some questions about his fitness; being undercover like that, for so long, in that kind of atmosphere, that far away from Earth— it can wear people down. They ran tests then, of course, to see if he was compromised. But he wasn’t, and he wanted to go back. Command wouldn’t let him; I think they thought he was just being a hardass, or maybe— maybe that he was trying to get himself killed.”

* * *

_“This is nuts,” Young says. “You realize that, right?”_

_He’s watching Telford move about the kitchen in jeans, bare-chested. Even like this, there’s a precision to his movements, like everything is part of a choreographed routine. He’s hitting all of his marks: pouring juice and leveling out spoonfuls of coffee, sliding a crisp cotton dish towel across an already-pristine stretch of countertop, rinsing dishes in the running sink with his head bowed._

_“Yeah, well,” Telford says, without turning. “It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.”_

_“_ Someone _, David, but Jesus, not you! You’ve done your time, and even if it hadn’t fucked you up—“_

_“It didn’t fuck me up.”_

_“—no one makes it through the first round of Russian Roulette and thinks, Well, great, I guess it’s time for a second shot!”_

_“People do,” Telford says. The water’s still running, but he’s stopped washing dishes. His hands are braced against the edge of the countertop. “Obviously. Or else there wouldn’t a game, would there?”_

_“People who want to die.”_

_“I don’t want to die,” Telford says. His head is tilted, just a little. His hair is short, so the curved line of his neck is visible: a place where Young wants to put his hand. What is it Telford says when Young is nagging him about coming up for air sometimes, maybe leaving the service someday, getting a life?_ Straight is the line of duty, curved is the line of beauty. _It’s a quote from a poem, maybe. Young’s never heard the whole thing._

_He watches Telford from across the kitchen for a long time without speaking. “I don’t know what it is you want, then,” he says._

* * *

“They put him on a gate team at first, and he seemed to do okay with that, mostly. But the thing about David is that he wears people down. Or— no. I don’t know what the thing about David is. He knows how to get what he wants. That’s, like, his superpower. He has this instinct; it always tells him just where to press.”

* * *

_But it’s Young who presses Telford up against the wall, clumsy thumbs digging into his shoulder blades. There’s no kissing, not at this point, not yet; instead, Young just puts his face blindly to Telford’s, pushing against him over and over in a scrape of unshaven skin on skin. His breath is hot and it pours out of him in gasps, gushes, like a struck well or a sputtering pump, and he doesn’t know how to communicate the urgency of that image to Telford: the hunger of the water to get out of the ground. New Mexico is a dry state, and maybe things aren’t the same there._

_He can picture Telford digging a well, though, he thinks dizzily. With all his hard angles; sweat coming off him into the dust; like he’s bleeding himself into the earth as he strikes the auger harder and harder, in search of the deep running current, in search of the reciprocal blood._

_He tastes like salt. Young follows the wetness of him down to his waistline, shoving hands into his pants and holding onto the flesh he finds._

  _“Yeah,” Telford says breathlessly. His head is tipped back. “Yeah, that’s it; that’s it; harder. Harder.”_

_They grapple. Their bodies slip together. Eventually, Young puts his palms flat against the wall for leverage, so that Telford, who’s always been stronger, can push back. That’s what Telford wants; that what he means, when he says_ harder _. He wants to be stopped; he wants a bruise around his wrist, on his shoulder. He wants to be held so it hurts._

* * *

“So in— I don’t know, January, February of this year, they sent him back in with some kind of story. I wasn’t privy to it; I don’t know what it was. I guess it worked, because he didn’t come back, and then at the beginning of March we got word that shit had gone down out on an Alliance border world, someplace where Telford and his team had been a couple months earlier, training a resistance cell. It’d been Third House territory then, not Sixth House, see, so it hadn’t occurred to anybody not to send him. But since then there’d been some kind of inter-Alliance landgrab, and now it was Sixth. Meanwhile, _Telford_ thinks it’s safe, because he doesn’t know that we’ve just sent his gate team back to make contact with the cell they were training. And maybe it still would’ve worked out okay, except that someone in the resistance cell decides to do a little bit of double-dealing, and rats Telford out as a Stargate officer in front of the Alliance _and_ his former team. In the ensuing firefight, the Alliance guns down half his team and takes him prisoner. Or, at least, that’s the story that gets back to us. It’s a clusterfuck, basically.

“I was planetside when the word came in, and there wasn’t even a question. I volunteered for the mission right away. It meant taking a light spacecraft out to Sixth House’s military stronghold, on a former colony world named Sest Bet. We knew that was where they’d be holding Telford, and we did have contacts there. The idea was that I would infiltrate the prison and break David out, take him to wherever I’d ditched my ship. The odds were— long. But it was that or nothing. That or nothing. There was no way that Homeworld Command was going to OK any kind of full-scale assault; not for one guy, even a colonel. We could afford to lose a colonel. We couldn’t afford to get involved in another all-out shooting war.”

* * *

_After the op meeting, he’s sitting in the mess with a cup of coffee, waiting for the tel’tak to be flown in from Area 51. He feels calm, but his boots keep tapping at the solid flooring. He can’t stop it; it’s like his feet aren’t really attached to his body._

_Unexpectedly, O’Neill sits down across from him._

_“Sir,” Young says, starting to stand up._  

_O’Neill waves a hand. “Sit down, Colonel. This conversation isn’t official.”_

_“…Yes, sir,” Young says. He sits, but doesn’t relax._

_O’Neill looks at him for a long time, kind of squinting— the way you’d eye up a used car you were thinking of buying. Trying to figure out what was wrong, why someone would want to sell it. “There’s a reason we pick the guys we do,” is what O’Neill finally says. “For this kind of mission. I know you know that. You’ve been in command; you’ve done the same thing.”_

_Young looks down at his styrofoam coffee cup. He doesn’t say anything._

_“Young guys,” O’Neill says. “Unmarried.”_

_Young says, “Actually, I’m getting divorced.”_  

_“Is that right,” O’Neill says. “That’s new.”_

_His eyes are very neutral. The thing about O’Neill is that he can feel like like an old t-shirt— comfortable, familiar. A conversation with him can be like taking a fishing trip with your dad, but with O’Neill you get halfway into the trip sometimes and realize that all along you were actually the fish._

_Young takes an abrupt sip of coffee. “The thing about divorce is” he says, “it makes you think about who your friends are.”_

_“I know.”_

_“David’s really—“_ Been there for me _, he starts to say. But the lie sticks in his throat. He can’t say that Telford’s been there for him, because Telford hasn’t. Telford had wanted him to stay with Emily, in fact._ Tell her it was a misunderstanding _, Telford had said. Sometimes it seems like he gets all his ideas about other people from television, like he expects life to come with commercial breaks and scene cuts._ David _, Young had said wearily,_ she’s not going to believe that. She’s not stupid. _But he hadn’t objected, either, when Telford had backed off, because it wasn’t like he’d expected that they would—_  

_Anything. He hadn’t expected that they would anything. He’d thought that things would stay the way they were, with him and Telford fucking around after missions, while Emily hosted her book club and went to yoga class and maybe got involved in a multilevel marketing scheme. It wouldn’t be a big deal. It wouldn’t be so different— difference from what people did._  

_“David’s really important to me,” he says instead. “We’ve known each other for a long time.”_  

_“I know,” O’Neill says._  

_“You’d do the same thing for Jackson. You_ have _done the same thing for Jackson.”_  

_“I’m not married,” O’Neill points out._

_“You’re a general.”_

_“You think that being a general’s like being married?” The corner of O’Neill’s mouth lifts. “Is it too soon to make a joke about why you’re getting divorced?”_

_Young refuses the bait. “Isn’t it? That’s what you’re saying, right? You’re stuck, stuck in this—“ he gestures tightly— “_ web _of things; promises, commitments. You_ are _something to someone. You’ve got to be that someone; you’ve got to stay that someone. That’s what you’re saying. Like everyone owns a piece of you. That’s what you’re saying. It’s not about me; it’s not about if_ I _get butchered; you’re worried about all the people who won’t get a return on their investments.”_  

_For a second, O’Neill looks tired, really tired. He runs a hand through his whitening hair. “You really think it’s the worst thing in the world,” he asks, “for people to care about you?”_

_Young’s hand tightens around his styrofoam cup. “There’s a difference,” he says._

_O’Neill shakes his head. He says, “Christ. Sometimes I wonder what the hell we’re doing to you kids.”_

_“I’m forty-two.”_

_“Too old for kamikaze missions.”_

_“There isn’t anyone,” Young says baldly. “Sir. If that’s what you’re worried about.”_

_In the moment he says it, he knows that it’s true. It’s a puzzling thought: after all, his parents are alive, and his brothers; he’s got friends in the program— people he can get a beer with. Even Emily won’t hate him, eventually. And he has his own men to command. All of that, though, is really an illusion, a kind of trick that he’s played on the world. He’s a creature who lives inside, he thinks, the locust-shell that all those people own a piece of, the only part of him that they can touch._

_O’Neill gazes at him in silence._

_“If that’s what you’re worried about,” Young says again, “then you don’t need to worry.”_

_O’Neill says, “That isn’t what I was worried about.”_

* * *

“I made it through the planetary defenses in a tel’tak and touched down outside the settlement. I was posing as an arms dealer; I had all the credentials. One of our contacts fronted for me. He got me in to talk to a low-level armorer in the fortress. From there, it was just a question of not getting caught. But I got caught. I—

“I— 

“I— remember being thrown in a cell with David.”

* * *

_“Hey.”_

_Someone’s fingers stroke the little wisps of hair back from his forehead. He’s groggy, waking up from the stun, and before there’s a him that can think about whether or not the touch is a good feeling, there’s just the fact of the body and the touch. His body, hurting. Then, gradually, the idea that the body that is hurting is him._

_The person touching him is Telford. Young blinks at him with leaden eyelids. Telford looks at him with one of the three or four expressions in his repertoire— this one, the most common one, suggesting that he’s about to laugh. He looks like that when he’s happy and when he’s angry; when he’s feeling other emotions, probably, but Young hasn’t ever learned to decipher all of them._

_“David,” Young says stupidly. He moistens his lips with a grimace._

_“Yeah,” Telford says. “It’s me.”_

_He looks terrible. There’s not much light in what is unquestionably some kind of medieval Alliance dungeon, but there’s enough light for Young to see that Telford’s black shirt is wet and pulled flat with some kind of liquid. Given that it’s also stuck to his chest, he’s guessing that the liquid’s blood._

_He closes his eyes. “I guess I fucked up.”_

_“No,” Telford says. “No.”_

_There’s something in his voice, a slight catch, which is so out-of-character for Telford that at first it just doesn’t compute. Young has to think through what’s going on before he furrows his brow and says, “Are you having an emotion?” —Incredulously, with the weak hint of a laugh._  

_“Shut the fuck up,” Telford says. But he doesn’t take his hand away from Young’s forehead._  

_“You_ are _. Oh, my God. If I’d known this was what it took, I’d’ve gotten caught by the Lucian Alliance_ years _ago.”_  

_But that makes the edges of Telford’s eyes go tight. He presses his lips together. “I’m the one who fucked up,” he says quietly._

_“No. You didn’t.”_  

_“I did. I’m so sorry.” He looks ill. “I didn’t mean to drag you into this. I fucked up. I fucked up, Everett. The rest of the team’s dead, aren’t they?”_

_Young reaches up and covers his hand. He’s never seen Telford like this, he thinks— shaken. He’s always thought of Telford as a kind of granite boulder. You’d have to split him open to move him. And the machinery didn’t exist that could do the job. “No,” he says. “Sharjah made it. And they think that Smith’ll wake up. It wasn’t your fault.”_

_Telford makes a despairing noise. He turns his hand so that they’re_ holding _hands now, which already seems weirdly intimate, more than anything that, in all the years of their friendship and of fucking, they’ve done. And then he lifts Young’s hand up and presses it to the side of his face. His skin is warm and slightly rough. Young is still too sedated to do anything other than think with a dim kind of amazement that this is the most they’ve ever touched. He doesn’t know what he means by that, exactly. Just— the most._

_He moves his fingers tentatively against Telford’s cheekbone. “Hey,” he says. “It’s going to be all right. I came to get you out.”_

_“I know,” Telford whispers. “I know you did.”_

_But Young knows that he thinks they’ll both die here. That’s why his eyes are damp._

* * *

“He was half-dead. Bleeding. They’d cut the Sixth House insignia into his chest. That’s what they do, you know, to traitors. To people who betray them. He’d lost a lot of blood already. But still, when they came to torture me, when they pulled me out, he—

* * *

_“Don’t,” Young says. His voice wheezes, because he’s been punched in the stomach once already. “Don’t. Don’t. David, don’t.”_

_One of the guards has Telford pressed face-first into the wall, and all Young can think of is the set of slashing lines carved into his chest, the bleeding gate glyphs that he’ll never be able to see the same way now. Telford’s shirt is still stiff with blood, blood that ought to be inside him, and from the panting sounds he makes as the guard seizes his short hair and grinds his face against the stone, he’s got to be in the process of losing more. But he’s still struggling: fingers scrabbling, muscles visibly clenching. He says something, but his voice is too choked; Young can’t make the words out._

_“Just let him go,” Young says wretchedly. “Please. I’ll come with you. I will. Just stop hurting him.”_

_But they don’t. They don’t, of course._

_David tries to say something again, his mouth moving indistinguishably against the stone wall._

_“David, don’t,” Young says. “I can’t hear you. I don’t understand.”_

* * *

“—They pulled me out. And they— did what they did. I don’t really remember most of it. I thought I was dead. I thought I was dying.”

* * *

_The Lucian woman breaks his leg in six places: crisply and precisely, with a hammer, like she’s splitting a two-by-four, like she’s doing a fucking home improvement project and they don’t sell his body in the right size pieces. She even eyes the result in neutral evaluation. He half-expects her to pull out a tape measure._

_“Tell me what you want,” he begs. He’s not going to give it to her, but he wants to_ know _, wants to know what this is_ for _._

  _There are tears and snot on his face, and he’s pretty sure he’s going to vomit. Torture isn’t as sanitary as it looks on TV. He knows this, but he’s never experienced it firsthand. They tell you about it in the training— that it’s designed to make you feel out of control of your body, that that’s part of it, the tears and vomit and piss and shit. That it’s designed to make you feel like you’re not human._

  _And he does. He does feel like he’s not human. He’s just something strapped down to a table for this woman to break._

  _But somewhere else in this building, in this godforsaken building, on this red ringed planet with its two swollen, imperfect moons, Telford too is leaking fluids out of his body, and for a second Young can feel him like he’s actually in the room: a sharp dark sluggish, roiling presence willing the humanity back into Young. Like they’re one person between them, only enough of a person for one person, and Telford is pushing his half of what they’ve got at Young, saying,_ Here, take mine.

_It’s raw and red and hard to touch, that half; hard to swallow. It’s hot and unpleasant and Young gags on it. Or maybe he’s started hallucinating at that point, because Telford hasn’t given him anything, not really. But Young feels it anyway. Feels like he has. Even as he vomits up clear bile from his stomach, and the Lucian turns him onto his face, touching her fingers to his spine._

* * *

“And he got me out. He’d pretended to have a seizure, and when the guard came in to check, he put him down. Stole his gun and his EM key; headed for where I was; then the two of us— we stole an Alliance skimmer and headed out of the base. Got shot down about a mile from where my ship was. He more-or-less carried me the rest of the way.”

* * *

_“David,” Young says. His voice is slurred, lazy. He can taste the red dust of the planet in his mouth._

_Telford adjusts Young’s arm, draped over his shoulder. Young can feel the sweat on the back of his neck. “What?”_

_“Let’s go back to New Mexico.”_

_Telford laughs, short and choppy. “I’ll take you all the way to fucking Antarctica if you want, buddy, but we gotta get back to Earth first.”_

_Young stares up at the hazy rings that bisect the sky. On one side is the sky and on the other side is the sky, but the sky is different. He can’t understand why the sky is different, why it seems to have a different color or texture. It makes him feel nauseated to look at, or maybe that’s the grate of bone on bone in his pelvis._

_“David,” he whispers. “I don’t think I ever should have left Wyoming.”_

_“Yeah? Tell me about Wyoming,” Telford says. His voice is strained. “What’s so great about Wyoming?”_

_“You’ve been there. You were at my wedding,” Young says._

_A muscle in Telford’s shoulder spasms. “Correct. I have been there. To the Young family homestead, to the little house on the— well, not the little house on the prairie.”_

_“No,” Young agrees. “Little house in the Bighorns.”_

_“I gotta say, it didn’t seem so great to me. What are there, like five restaurants in Buffalo?”_

_“But the hills. There are so many animals up in the hills.” Young closes his eyes and lets his head rest against Telford’s collar. “Antelope, sheep, and deer… elk… eagles. Lots of eagles.”_

_“But no actual buffalo.”_

_“No buffalo,” Young says. “Just… antelope. Pronghorns. I used to love that. Being out in the mountains, someplace so still you can hear your breath… it’s the only time I ever felt like I was allowed to fill up my body. The rest of the time I was always just… compressed. It’s hard to take up space around other people. I was always the third- or fourth-best. But animals… don’t understand third-best. You’re there and they’re there, alive, just alive, so alive, two animals looking at each other, amazed that something else in this world is alive, and that’s… the only time I’ve ever been happy, I think.”_

_Telford is silent. “That’s not true,” he says. “About you being happy.”_

_“Why would I fucking lie?”_  

_“You’re being overdramatic.”_

_“David.” Young exhales a ragged breath against the blade of Telford’s shoulder. “You’re dragging me up the hill I’m actually going to fucking die on.”_

_“That’s not what’s going to happen.”_

_“I’m saying, I’ve got no reason to lie.”_

_The muscles of Telford’s body are tense._

_“I’m sorry,” Young says. “That I wasn’t happy.”_

_At his waist, Telford’s hand clenches: fingertips digging into Young’s abdomen, the way they’d dig into him when Telford was coming, his whole body clenched in a taut convulsion that looked like it hurt. Young understands for the first time, in a flash of clarity, how thin the line is between pain and pleasure._

_Telford says, “What the fuck are you apologizing to_ me _for?”_

* * *

“We cleared orbit and rendezvoused with the _Odyssey_ in deep space. I didn’t know that; I didn’t wake up until a few days later. By then, I was on Earth. So was he. I saw him in the hospital— more at first, and then less later.”

* * *

_He blinks, with the sense that he’s raising windowpanes stuck with the swollen wood and warped fittings of a hundred years. He can sense Telford before he sees him, a bronze-and-black presence in the periphery, made darker in his hair and his complexion by his light-blue medical gown._

_Young turns his head against the starchy paper of his pillow. It feels good and cool beneath his cheek. He is glad to be resting against, even as the gradual prickling awareness spreads through him that something hurts; something is not_ right _._

_He is in the infirmary, he thinks; but he doesn’t know why._  

_He gazes at Telford and sees that he is sleeping. Something—_

_—hurts, Young thinks._

_Something is not_ right _._

_But he doesn’t know what it is._

_Telford looks beautiful in the lamplight, even though the edge of a bandage shows at his neckline and there are bruises on the knuckles of his hands. Young has watched him sleep before, and always been sucker-punched by the urge to touch him. Like a physical hunger in some part of his body he couldn’t point to, something that it wasn’t necessary to equate with desire._

_But now he doesn’t want to touch Telford._

_He feels dizzy. He closes his eyes._

_“Hey,” Telford says, waking on an indrawn breath. His voice is rough: a morning-voice, a bed-voice._

_Young keeps his eyes shut. “What happened?” he whispers. “I feel… did I hit my head?”_

_That would explain the dizziness, he thinks._

_“No,” Telford says. “The doctors’ll tell you. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.”_

_Young doesn’t feel like he’s okay._

_“Something’s wrong,” he says._

_Telford touches his hand, and Young jerks back on instinct._

_“No,” Telford says. “I promise. Everything’s going to be okay.”_

_Young opens his eyes and stares up at the ceiling. A very thin crack, like a stray hair, runs across its length. Or is it a stain, the mark of some leak or spill, something that got out of its container and worked its way into the building’s infrastructure? It matters, he thinks, what type of disaster it is; it matters. But he can’t figure out why it would._

_Telford takes his hand again, and this time Young doesn’t pull away._

_“It’s going to be okay,” Telford says. “You’ll see.”_

* * *

Young spread his hands: a gesture of _There you have it._ “He got better, and I didn’t,” he said. “He went back to active duty. I got divorced. As far as I knew, that was all there was to it.”

Davis was looking at his computer screen with a small frown. He tapped a key, then tapped it again.

Wray had her hands folded on the table. Young accidentally caught her eye and then looked away. He wondered how much she’d been able to guess about the parts of the story he was concealing. But then he thought: how could she guess? Everything important about the hidden parts of those memories was as unique to him as a fingerprint. Even if she guessed the outlines, she would never know the real story. No one would, except for Telford and him.

He could not decide how to feel about this revelation.

Finally, Davis looked up. “Protocol dictates that we ask,” he said, “if you have a sense, at this point, of how much of the story you just told me is corrupted.”

Young felt his jaw tighten. “I don’t—“ he said, and then coughed to cover the fact that his voice had failed him. “I don’t know. There are— it’s like pieces try to break through, in the second part, after I get to the planet. But never enough for me to know what really happened, and never enough to be sure. How much of it is real, I mean. Or if— if it started before then.”

Davis nodded neutrally, as though this was what he’d expected.

“Tell me,” Young said. This time, his voice cracked.

“Everything that happened after you encountered Colonel Telford on P63-663, the planet you’re calling Sest Bet, is registering as significantly altered.” Davis paused. “However, after your return to Earth, your cognitive signature stabilizes. On the basis of that, I think we can confidently say that you haven’t been acting under Lucian suggestion over the past eight months. The programming appears to have been limited to your experiences on the mission." 

“Right,” Young said numbly. “Right.” 

That was good, he thought. That ought to be good. He ought to feel something about it. But he didn’t.

“Given that fact,” Davis said, “I want to emphasize that you have the option not to proceed with the reconstruction. If you make that choice, I can say with 99% certainty that Stargate Command will strip you of your security clearance; even with a successful reconstruction, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be judged free of interference. But in the absence of a clear, present security threat—“

“I want to,” Young said, interrupting. “You don’t have to— give me all the boilerplate nonsense. I know what I’m doing. I want to know. I want to remember.”

Davis rested gentle eyes on him. Young wondered how many other people he’d done this to, and if he got resigned to it; if that was kindness in his eyes, or just exhaustion— exhaustion at the whole situation, at the whole _world_. “All right,” Davis said. “Then what we’ll start with today is administering a mild sedative to lower your inhibitions, and having you repeat your memory of the events.”

* * *

“I made it through the planetary defenses in a tel’tak and touched down outside the settlement. I was posing as an arms dealer; they’d managed to fit me out last minute. One of our contacts got me in to meet with a low-level armorer in the fortress. I was supposed to be selling him a load of zats I’d stolen off the wreck of a ha’tak. I just had to not get caught. But I got caught. I… I…”

“You’re hesitating. Why are you hesitating?” 

“I remember being thrown in a cell with David.”

“But that’s not what happened.”

“I remember waking up in a cell with David.”

“But that’s not what happened.”

“I remember waking up—“

* * *

_“Hey.”_  

_Someone’s fingers stroke the little wisps of hair back from his forehead. He’s groggy, waking up from the stun, and before there’s a him that can think about whether or not the touch is a good feeling, there’s just the fact of the body and the touch. His body, hurting. Then, gradually, the idea that the body that is hurting is him._

_The person touching him is Telford. But—_

_“David,” Young says stupidly. He moistens his lips with a grimace._  

_“Yeah,” Telford says. “It’s me.”_

_—something’s wrong. They’re not in a cell. Young is lying on a low couch._

_The dark velvet of its cushions is soft under his hands._

_His head aches._

_Telford has never touched him like this._

_“I’m sorry,” Telford says softly.”I would’ve stopped them from stunning you if I_  
_could’ve. I brought you some water, if you want something to drink.”_

_The water is cold. It tastes like underground minerals. He says—_

_“It’s not your fault,” he says._

_“What,” he says incredulously, “are you having an emotion?”_

_“Are you having an emotion?”_

_“I’m so sorry,” Telford says. He looks ill. He makes a despairing noise. “I didn’t mean to drag you into this. I fucked up. I fucked up, Everett.”_

* * *

“We weren’t in a cell.”

“No.”

“He wasn’t bleeding. He wasn’t hurt.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Try.”

“I don’t remember.”

“We’ll come back to that. What happened next?”

“When they came to torture me—“

“No. That didn’t happen." 

“They came to torture me.”

“That didn’t happen.”

“They came to—“

“That didn’t happen.”

“There was a room— She, Kiva, she was there.”

“What did she say?”

“She was there in the room at some point; she said—“

* * *

_“He’s pretty, isn’t he?” the woman says, eyeing Young clinically as she cradles his chin in the palm of her hand. “That curly hair. Such a shame.”_

_“Get your hands off him,” Telford says._

_“If you think he’s getting out of here alive,” the woman says, “I’m afraid you’re in for a terrible disappointment.”_

_Young jerks against his restraints. “David, don’t do this,” he says. “It’s not too late.”_

_Telford turns away._

_The line of his back in the firelight._

_The forced straightness of his shoulders._

_Straight is the line of duty, and curved—_

_Curved is —_

 

_“Don’t,” Young says. His voice wheezes, because he’s been punched in the stomach once already. “Don’t. Don’t. David, don’t.”_

 

_His voice breaking like water on rocks._

 

_David tries to say something, but his voice is too choked._

_“David, don’t,” Young says. “I can’t hear you. I don’t understand.”_

* * *

“That’s all I remember. Just— pieces.” 

“What happened next?”

“He— wasn’t there. He wasn’t there. In— the room. No. No. A different room. No. The same room. I was— I couldn’t move. He was there. And then he wasn’t there. He was there. He wasn’t there and then he was there. I couldn’t think; I couldn’t move; my head was— he came in. He was angry. She said— I don’t know.”

“You do.”

“I don’t remember.”

“There’s a part of you that remembers.”

“You’re wrong. I don’t remember.”

But, of course, he did.

* * *

_The Lucian woman breaks his leg in six places: crisply and precisely, with a hammer, like she’s splitting a two-by-four, like she’s doing a fucking home improvement project and they don’t sell his body in the right size pieces. She even looks at the result in a neutral, considering way. He half-expects her to pull out a tape measure._

_“Why are you doing this?” Young sobs. He can’t get away from it. He can’t get away from it. Some sort of vise is clamped down on his lower body. “Tell me what you want; just tell me what you want me to say!”_

_“Unfortunately,” the woman says, “this is not about information. There’s nothing you can tell me that I haven’t heard from David.”_

_“Where’s David?” Young asks her. “Please. Please. I want David.”_

_“I’ll tell him you asked for him,” the woman says._

  _She—_

_But somewhere else in this building, in this godforsaken building, on this red ringed planet with its two swollen, imperfect moons, Telford too is leaking fluids out of his body, and for a second Young can feel him like he’s actually in the room: a sharp dark sluggish, roiling presence willing the humanity back into Young. Like they’re one person between them, only enough of a person for one person, and Telford is pushing his half of what they’ve got at Young, saying,_ Here, take mine.

_It is raw and red and hard to swallow._

_Blood leaks from the corner of his slack mouth._

_It tastes like warm rainwater._

_It is raw and red and hard to swallow._

_He can picture Telford digging a well._

_Searching for the better water._  

_But when he strikes the dirt—_

   
_Blood._

 

_He aspirates it and for a moment he’s choking._

_He can feel the pieces of his leg with every spasm._

_Someone shifts him so he’s facedown on the table._

_Kiva places her hand in the center of his back._

_“I’m afraid I can’t allow you to die,” she says._

   
_He knows what happens next, in this memory._

 

_The metal touches his spine, clamps down on the two sides of his hipbone._

_He hears the creak as it starts to work._

* * *

Young stared down at the smooth black surface of the table. He was aware of the frame of the plastic glasses resting heavily against his cheekbones. “So, anyway,” he said. “That’s what she did.”

There was a silence. 

“Perhaps we could leave things there for the night,” Wray said. Her expression was frozen, very neutral.

Young supposed his was too. He hoped it was.

“It’s going to get worse,” Davis said. ““Before it gets better. If it gets better.” He had stopped typing, but was still staring at the screen of his computer. His voice was not unkind, and something in his tone caused Young to understand that the response had been intended not for Wray, but for him.

“We could at least give him something,” Wray said. “For—“

But she left the sentence unfinished.

Davis spread his hands. “What would I give him?”

“It’s all right,” Young said. He swallowed thickly.

But Davis ran a quick hand over the top of his head, the only sign of preoccupation Young had seen from him, always assuming it was actually a sign of preoccupation. “No,” he said, sounding resigned. “She’s right. Take the night. Get some sleep. We’ll start again tomorrow morning.” 

 

 

**DAY TWO**

 

“What we try to do,” Davis said, “is try to build on the memories you’ve already accessed. Focus on the sensory details. How it looked, how it tasted, how it smelled. I’ll prompt you with a series of questions designed to lead you through the narrative. We’ll take it one piece at a time.”

Young already felt immensely tired. “Wouldn’t it be easier just to kill me? Reboot my brain? Then I’d remember.”

The look Davis gave him was neutral. “Homeworld Command doesn’t endorse that kind of procedure,” he said.

“Right. Because God forbid somebody get killed.”

“Yes. That’s about the long and short of it.”

“Think of the liability issues.”

“That’s not the reason we don’t endorse the procedure,” Davis said. He amended: “Not the only reason. Respect for life is one of our guiding principles. I know you know that.” 

Without meaning to, Young caught Wray’s eye. She wasn’t wearing the dragonfly pin today; instead, there was a little silver thistle, like the ones that grew up in Cheyenne Mountain State Park during the summer. She had probably intended a more obvious association. He wanted to hate her for the nakedness of the manipulation, but couldn’t.

He turned back to Davis. “Respect for life,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Have you ever had your mind fucked with?”

“I haven’t.”

“Right,” Young said. “Right.”

There was a silence.

“The sooner we start, the sooner it’ll be over with,” Davis said. He paused. His mouth crooked a little, wry and exhausted. “—Is how it generally works. At least, that’s what I’ve been led to believe.”

Young liked him, was the thing. He’d always had a soft spot for the quiet ones, the ones with that deadpan sense of humor, whether they were gentle, like Davis, or more like Telford. You couldn’t stop liking someone just because you told yourself you shouldn’t. There was no logic to it. That wasn’t how the liking worked. 

“Right,” he said again, looking down at where his hands gripped the edge of the table. “I guess I should start from the beginning. Again.”

* * *

“I made it through the planetary defenses in a tel’tak and touched down outside the settlement. I was pretending to be an arms dealer there to peddle stolen zats to Sixth House. One of our contacts on the planet got me in. I was supposed to meet with a low-level armorer in the fortress. I got caught. They stunned me, and I woke up in… a room. A room. Telford was there. He said…”

* * *

_“Hey.”_

_Someone’s fingers—_

 

_—settle against his shoulder. He’s groggy, waking up from the stun._

_The person touching him is Telford._

 

_“David,” Young says stupidly. He moistens his lips with a grimace._

_“Yeah,” Telford says. “It’s me.”_

_Young is lying on a low couch._

_The dark velvet of its cushions is soft under his hands._

_His head aches._

_“I’m sorry,” Telford says softly.”I would’ve stopped them from stunning you if I_  
_could’ve. I brought you some water, if you want something to drink.”_  

_The water is cold. It tastes like underground minerals. It_  
_tastes like the insides of asteroids. He grimaces and sits up, his head still pounding._  

_“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” he says._

* * *

“That’s all I remember. It just sort of— skips. Like a broken record.”

“Okay. That’s okay. We’ll start from there.”

* * *

_“Hey.”_  

_Someone’ s fingers settle against his shoulder._  
_He pushes into the touch, unthinking._  
_He’s groggy, waking up from the stun._

_“David,” Young says stupidly. He moistens his lips with a grimace._

_“Yeah,” Telford says. “It’s me.”_

_Young is lying on a low couch._

_The dark velvet of its cushions is soft under his hands._

_His head aches._

_“I’m sorry,” Telford says softly.”I would’ve stopped them from stunning you if I_  
_could’ve. I brought you some water. I don’t know if you want something to drink.”_

_The water is cold. It tastes like underground minerals. It_  
_tastes like the insides of asteroids. He grimaces and sits up, his head still pounding._

_“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” he says._

_Telford looks terrible._

_Telford looks at him with one of the three or four expressions in his repertoire— this one, the most common one, being that he’s about to laugh. He looks like that when he’s happy and when he’s angry; when he’s feeling other emotions, probably, but Young hasn’t ever learned to decipher all of them._

_“You really have to ask? You were being an idiot like always, rushing into situations_  
_you’re too damn old for and don’t understand, trying to save everybody, trying to_  
_be the hero."_  

_There’s something in his voice, a slight catch, which is so out-of-character for Telford that at first it just doesn’t compute. Young has to think through what’s going on—_

_“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” Young says._

* * *

“I don’t think this is working.”

“It’s working.”

“I don’t remember what happened next.”

“You do. Let’s start again from the beginning.”

* * *

_Someone’ s fingers settle against his shoulder._  
_He pushes into the touch, unthinking._  
_He’s groggy, waking up from the stun._

_The person touching him is Telford._

  

_“David,” Young says stupidly. He moistens his lips with a grimace._  

_“Yeah,” Telford says. “It’s me.”_

  

_Young is lying on a low couch._

_The dark velvet of its cushions is soft under his hands._

_His head aches._

 

_Telford has never touched him like this._

 

_“I’m sorry,” Telford says softly.”I would’ve stopped them from stunning you if I_  
_could’ve. I brought you some water, if you want something to drink.”_

_The water is cold. It tastes like underground minerals. It_  
_tastes like the insides of asteroids. He grimaces and sits up, his head still pounding._

_“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” he says._

_Telford looks terrible._

_Telford looks at him with one of the three or four expressions in his repertoire— this one, the most common one, being that he’s about to laugh. He looks like that when he’s happy and when he’s angry; when he’s feeling other emotions, probably, but Young hasn’t ever learned to decipher all of them._

 

_“You really have to ask? You were being an idiot like always, rushing into situations_  
_you’re too damn old for and don’t understand, trying to save everybody, trying to_  
_be the hero.”_

  

_There’s something in his voice, a slight catch, which is so out-of-character for Telford that at first it just doesn’t compute. Young has to think through what’s going on—_

 

_“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” Young says._

_“You really have to ask?"_

 

_“But they caught you,” Young says, uncomprehending. "They caught you. That’s what_  
_Sharjah told us; they killed Valdez and Claver and they took you away.”_  
_Telford sits down on the opposite end of the couch. His head is bowed. The firelight_  
_puts his face in shadow and paints his hair with echoes of flame. “Yeah,” he says._

  

_“I don’t understand_ _what’s going on here,” Young says._

* * *

“No. It’s gone.”

“Focus on the details. You’d been stunned. Did your head hurt? Your hands and feet— pins and needles?” 

“I don’t remember.”

“Was it hot or cold in the room?” 

“I said _I don’t remember._ ”

“All right. We’ll leave that there for now. What’s the next thing you remember?”

* * *

_Telford turns away._

_The line of his back in the firelight._

_“David, don’t,” Young says._

_The line of his back in the firelight._

 

_“You don’t have to do this. I’ll give him the drug. He won’t remember.”_

 

_Straight is the line of duty._

 

_“I’ll do it myself. I know how to make the memories stick.”_

_“That was not what we agreed.”_

_“You_ killed _my soldiers.”_

_“I saved you from prison, I think you mean. After_ your _fuck-up. Or would they have shot you?”_

_“Oh, fuck you. You were saving your own skin.”_

_“I’m very sorry that I broke your toys. There. Is that better?”_

_Toy soldiers._

_He hadn’t ever met Valdez. But Claver’d had wire-rimmed glasses,_  
_and just a little bit of a Kenyan accent left._

 

_“David,” Young says._

_His voice breaking like water on rocks._

 

_“Though I suppose I do understand. He’s pretty, isn’t he?”_  
_The woman eyes Young clinically as she cradles his chin in the palm_  
_of her hand. “That curly hair. Such a shame.”_

_“Get your hands off him,” Telford says._

 

_“Are you having an emotion?”_

_“Shut the fuck up.”_

_“You are. Oh, my God.”_  

 

_“They won’t believe him anyway, once they know he’s been drugged.”_

_“Do you think so? I’m not convinced.”_

 

_“I’m so sorry,” Telford whispers. “I didn’t_  
_mean for this to happen. I didn’t know it would be you, Everett._  
_I never wanted you involved.”_

 

_“I think, David, that I’m going to need you to leave us for a while.”_

* * *

“He— left, I guess. I don’t remember him leaving. After that she—“

“This is after Colonel Telford left you to be tortured?

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

* * *

_Telford gave him something._

_It is red and raw and hard to swallow._

_The line of his back in the firelight._

 

_Young is facedown._

_She has broken his leg into pieces._

_She has broken his leg into—_

 

_—water on rocks._

_He is a broken toy on a table._

 

_It is hard to swallow._

_Red blood leaks like water from his mouth._

* * *

“At some point I— blacked out.”

“What happened after that?”

“I—“

* * *

_“You gotta wake up, buddy. Wake up, okay? I know it hurts.”_

* * *

“He woke me up; he wanted to escape—“

“That’s not what happened.”

“He woke me up; he—“

“That’s not what happened.”

“I know. I know it’s not.”

* * *

_“It won’t hurt,” David says. His voice cracks. He swallows. He’s holding a needle._  

_Blood swirls in the barrel of the syringe._

_It looks like smoke falling apart in the air over a mountain._

 

_It is raw and red._

_A speck of red dust in the light from the window._

 

_“You’re a coward,” the woman says contemptuously._  
_“I should’ve made you watch while he screamed.”_

 

_Telford looks terrible._

 

_Telford makes a despairing noise._

 

_“I’m so sorry.”_

_Blood swirls in the barrel of the syringe._

 

_It’s all right,” Telford says. “You won’t remember. You won’t_  
_remember it hurting. It won’t ever have happened.”_

_“It’s going to be okay.”_

_“I’m going to get you out of here,” Telford says. “It’s going to be okay.”_

_“How can you—“ The drug is already putting Young under._  
_“How can you possibly think it’s going to be okay?”_

 

_Someone’s fingers stroke the little wisps of hair back from his forehead. There’s just the fact of the body and the touch. His body, hurting. Then, gradually, the idea that the body that is hurting is him._

 

_His body._

_The line of his body._

* * *

“That’s all I remember. That’s all there is, right? He gave me the drug.”

“Are you sure you don’t remember something else after that?”

* * *

_He dreams that he is strapped into the tel’tak._

_No._

_He is strapped into the tel’tak._

_He cannot feel his body._

_Telford is—_  

_“Make sure it’s out before they scan you.” Kiva presses the communicator into Telford’s palm. She watches him in a narrow, predatory way that is both over-intimate and remote. “You do look delicious when you bleed, David.”_

_Telford jerks away, turning his back to her. “Fuck off and leer at someone else. Don’t you have minions for that?"_  

_“But the fact that they’re my minions rather spoils the enjoyment.” She traces a line of sweat up his neck with one finger. He shivers. “Are you scared of me?”_

_“No,” David says shortly, and then makes a bitten-off pained sound as the knife digs into him._

_“I would’ve done the cutting myself,” Kiva says, peering over his shoulder clinically. “Or perhaps we could’ve gotten your friend to do it. I’m sure he’d be more than happy to, at this point. After what you’ve done to him.”_

* * *

“There was no crash. We never made the climb up the caldera. But then— when did we—“

* * *

_“Tell me about Wyoming,” Telford whispers._

_Young’s never seen Telford like this, he thinks— never seen him shaken._  
_He’s always thought of Telford as a kind of granite boulder. You’d have to_  
_split him open to move him. And the machinery didn’t exist that could do the job._

_“You’ve been there,” Young says. His voice sounds_  
_heavy. Drugged. “You were at my wedding.”_

_Something about Telford’s face flinches. “Correct. I have been there._  
_To the Young family homestead, to the little house on the—_  
_well, not the little house on the prairie.”_

_“No,” Young agrees vaguely. “Little house in the Bighorns.”_

_“I gotta say, it didn’t seem so great to me. What are there, like five restaurants in Buffalo?”_

_“But the hills. There are so many animals up in the hills.” Young closes his eyes._  
_He can feel the heat of Telford’s body. “Antelope, sheep, and deer…_  
_elk… eagles. Lots of eagles.”_

_“But no actual buffalo.”_

_“No buffalo,” Young says. His thoughts drift. “Just… antelope. Pronghorns. I used to love that. Being out in the mountains, someplace so still you can hear your breath… it’s the only time I ever felt like I was allowed to fill up my body. The rest of the time I was always just… compressed. It’s hard to take up space around other people. I was always the third- or fourth-best. But animals… don’t understand third-best. You’re there and they’re there, alive, just alive, so alive, two animals looking at each other, amazed that something else in this world is alive, and that’s… the only time I’ve ever been happy, I think."_  

_Telford is silent. “That’s not true,” he says. “About you being happy.”_  

_“Why,” Young asks, “would I fucking lie?”_

* * *

“When did that happen? When the _fuck_ did that happen? I don’t know _when_ anything happened; it’s like someone took a sledgehammer to my head; it’s all just _there,_ in pieces—“

“It’s normal for there to be some confusion. We’ll continue to work on it tomorrow.”

“How many times do I have to tell this story?”

“Until Homeworld Command is satisfied with the results,” Davis said.

  

 

**DAY THREE**

 

“Should I just start from the beginning again?”

“Please. In as much detail as you remember.”

* * *

“I made it through the planetary defenses in a tel’tak and touched down outside the settlement. I was pretending to be an arms dealer, I’d come into a load of stolen zats and was trying to sell them off to Sixth House. One of our contacts on the planet got me into the fortress. I got caught. They stunned me. I woke up—“

* * *

_He wakes up._

_He takes a drink of water._

_“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” he says._

_“You really have to ask?”_

 

_“But they caught you,” Young says, uncomprehending.”They caught you. That’s what_  
_Sharjah told us; they killed Valdez and Claver and they took you away.”_

_Telford sits down on the opposite end of the couch. His head is bowed. The firelight_  
_puts his face in shadow and paints his hair with echoes of flame. “Yeah,” he says._

 

_“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” Young says._

  

_“What the fuck did you think was going to happen?” Young says loudly. “Did you think I was just going to_ leave _you here?”_  

_Telford makes a despairing noise._

_“What, are you having an emotion?”_

 

_“I’m so sorry,” Telford whispers. “I didn’t_  
_mean for this to happen. I didn’t know it would be you, Everett._  
_I never wanted you involved. Why couldn’t you just stay on Earth?”_

* * *

“I don’t think I can remember anything else.”

“You’re skipping. Like you said. A record.”

* * *

_“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” Young says._

  

_“Yeah,” Telford says. His head is bowed. “That’s more or less what happened.”_

  

_“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” Young says._

_“You really have to ask?”_

* * *

“I don’t— I can’t remember.”

“Everett.”

“I didn’t say you could use my name.”

* * *

_“Yeah,” Telford says. “That’s more or less what happened.”_  

_Young sits very still._

_“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” he says._

* * *

“I feel sick.”

“It’s better if you push through it.”

“I don’t want to fucking push through it.”

“Everett.”

* * *

_“Yeah,” Telford says. “That’s more or less what happened.”_

_Young sits very still._

_“Kiva and her people couldn’t take the risk, is the_  
_thing— I’d been publicly ID’d as a Stargate officer, and if they did nothing, then the_  
_SGC would never buy it. It’d look too suspicious; they ‘d know that something was up._  
_And then what use would I be? They had to make it look good, so they improvised._  
_I didn’t know about Valdez and Claver; I want to think that I would never— but maybe_  
_I would. It’s hard to say, at this point. It’s hard to really know for sure.”_

_Young sits very still._

_“Say something,” Telford says._

 

_There’s something in his voice, a slight catch._

_“Are you having an emotion?”_

 

_“Say something,” Telford says._

  

_At the National Museum of Nuclear Science, in Albuquerque, you can buy little_  
_pieces of trinitite in the gift shop, a kind of glossy, crystalline, leaf-colored glass_  
_that the sand had turned into when the bomb exploded. The sand at Alamogordo._  
_It looks like a gemstone. People made it into jewelry in the Fifties, before they knew it_  
_was radioactive; they thought the sand had just melted, like you could turn from one_  
_thing into another under that kind of stress and not undergo a change at the atomic_  
_level. Like you could not be destabilized, if that happened to you._  

_He feels suddenly an intense sympathy for those little flecks of crystal, no bigger_  
_than a fingernail. His body too has been turned to glass. He has to set his hands_  
_carefully on his knees, in case they start breaking._  

_The process feels like fossilization, the pores of his bones open and the rush of_  
_the ocean pouring all through him. He is reminded of the dinosaur bone fragments_  
_he used to find on the ranch. Well, he says “dinosaur bone,” but lots of kinds_  
_of things have bones. Other things also died in the late Cretaceous. Lots of_  
_things died, all kinds of things. He will never know with any sureness the animal_  
_origin of the bones. What kind of thing they were a part of, that flew or hopped_  
_or ran. He will only ever know that they turned to chert, to agate, to jasper._  
_Little flecks of rock like poppy seeds on their surface._  

_That happened. He knows, because he’s held it in his hand._  

_And other bones were eaten by the earth, and never surfaced._

 

_“Say something,” Telford says._

 

_But Young’s mouth has turned to glass, and he cannot form the words._  
_The bomb has gone off and elsewhere, somewhere, they marvel at the disaster,_  
_but here at the center of the explosion there’s just light and heat and the new_  
_bodies that people have to live in now that the atoms have altered and the old_  
_bodies, with their moving, breathing, speaking mouths, are gone._  

_He would have to break his glass mouth open to speak._

_He is brittle and transparent._

  

 

_“I came to rescue you,” he whispers._

_“I know,” Telford says.”I know you did.”_

* * *

“He told me the truth,” Young said. “Eventually.”

“And then?”

“And then he left.” Young looked down at his hands. They were bone and muscle. He flexed them gently.

His face felt hot where the plastic glasses were pressed against his head. “Has anyone got,” he said, “a Tylenol, or— it’s just that all this gear is… starting to give me a headache.”

Davis watched him unreadably. “Maybe we should end there for tonight,” he said.

 

 

**DAY FOUR**

 

“I made it through the planetary defenses in a tel’tak and touched down outside the settlement. I was pretending to be an arms dealer, I’d come into a load of stolen zats and was trying to sell them off to Sixth House. One of our contacts on the planet got me into the fortress. I got caught. They stunned me. I woke up. Telford was there. He told me the truth. He left. After a while, the guards took me to another room.”

* * *

_She has eyes like smoke, that sort of flat opaqueness. “I’ve never_  
_thought of David as a particularly sentimental person,” she says._  
_“But then, you know, I often find that it’s that sort of man who has_  
_one sentimental weakness. Usually a dog, or something._  
_You seem to be his dog.”_  

_She had injected him with something. He doesn’t know what._  
_An interrogation agent, maybe._  

_It’s starting to make his vision blurry._

_He tries to swallow. His tongue is stuck to the roof of his dry mouth._

* * *

“I don’t know how long I was there before Telford showed up.”

* * *

_“David, don’t.”_

_“I’m very sorry that I broke your toys.”_

_“I’ll give him the drug. He won’t remember.”_

_“After_ your _fuck-up—"_

_“Oh, fuck you.”_

 

_The line of his back in the firelight._

_Straight._

  

_"It’s not a terribly plausible story, is it?" Kiva says. "I mean—_  
_perhaps if he were a member of SG-1. Do you think? With their record_  
_of rather effortless salvations. Always appearing at the last moment to save_  
_the day, without any cost accruing. Or if you weren’t quite so— well._  
_You know who you are.”_  

_A muscle in Telford's jaw jumps. "Oh, please. Tell me who I am._

 

_“David,” Young says._

_He can picture Telford digging a well._

_What is it Telford says when Young is nagging him about coming up for air sometimes?_

 

_“I know I fucked up. I know I did. You want me to prove_  
_my loyalty? My commitment? I’ll do it.”_

_“What I want is for you to leave.”_

_“I can’t do that.”_

_“David. Please don’t think that you can test me. Things are going to happen in this room_  
_that I don’t want for you to see.”_

 

_Straight is the line of duty._  
_Curved is the line of beauty._  

_He strikes the auger harder and harder, in search of the deep running current._

 

 

_“You can rough him up a little. I don’t care. Break a leg, or a leg and a hand._  
_Make it look like he had to work for it, escaping.”_

_“It’s an interesting proposition.”_

  

_The line of water under the earth._  
_Things died in the late Cretaceous, and later he dug them out of the fields._  
_They fit perfectly in the palm of his hand._  
_Little flecks of rock like poppy seeds on their surface._  
_Chert, agate, jasper._

  
_Red._

* * *

“It doesn’t make sense. I think it’s getting _more_ mixed-up, not less.”

“It’ll become clearer. Do you want to move on for now?”

“The part that comes next— she tortured me. I think we’ve covered this part.”

 “Indulge me.” 

* * *

  _“If it’s any consolation,” she says, “I think you’ll_  
_lose consciousness quite soon.”_

 

_He is made of bones, like other creatures._  
_No. He is made of glass._

  

_He aspirates on the blood and for a moment he’s choking._  

_He can feel the pieces of his leg with every spasm._

  _Someone shifts him so he’s facedown on the table._

  _Kiva places her hand in the center of his back._  

_“I’m afraid I can’t allow you to die,” she says._

  

_He is made of breakable bones, like other creatures._  
_They also died in the late Cretaceous._  
_The things they were a part of, that flew and hopped and ran._  
_Little flecks of rock, like poppy seeds on their surface._  
_He dug them out of the fields. Like glass from where the bomb had been tested._

  

_“However, this is going to hurt quite a lot.”_

  

_He knows what happens next, in this memory._

  

_The metal touches his spine, clamps down on the two sides of his hipbone._    
_He hears the creak as it starts to work._  

 

_He—_  

_—screams._

 

_At certain pitches, a scream can shatter glass._  
_And that’s what he’s made of, isn’t it? That’s why he’s breaking._  
_His lips and teeth and tongue, his brittle vertebrae and pelvis._

 

_What happened to the little animals in the desert?_  
_When they set off the bomb._

 

_He’s bleeding now._  

_He can hear it running off of the table._  

_Like the flecks you find in fossilized bone. Agate, jasper, and chert._  

_He pictures the whole spiny structure of one of David’s chamisas, preserved_  
_like petrified wood, but in the form of glass. Green glass. Pretty and brittle_  
_and not a plant anymore, not really._  

_“Please,” he whispers. “Why are you doing this?”_

_But he doesn’t whisper that, because he can’t talk._

_He has moved outside of the country where people form words._

* * *

“He gave me the drug after that. Or— no. There was something else. I don’t know what.”

“Try to remember.”

“I can’t.”

“Try to remember.”

* * *

_Someone’s fingers stroke the little wisps of hair back from his forehead._

 

_Telford has never touched him like this._

 

_“David,” Young whispers._

 

_Telford looks terrible._

_He thinks they’re both going to die here. That’s why his eyes are damp._

 

_“Hey,” Telford says, his voice choked. His fingers curl in Young’s hair. It’s_  
_more of a tightening, really, like his whole body’s tense with pain._  

Someone _is in pain. Young can see the pain, like a diffuse cloud._  
_It’s a red color. It wanders around the room. It_  
_tastes like warm rainwater._  

_He thinks of a line under the earth._

_He closes his eyes._

* * *

“There’s something else; I can feel it. But I don’t remember.”

“Do you want to work on it tomorrow?”

“Oh, Christ.” Young abruptly pulled the plastic glasses off and buried his aching head in his hands. “Just shoot me,” he said, his voice muffled. “That’d solve all our problems. Right? Right. Fucking— shoot me. I’m tired of this. I’m tired of doing this.”

Davis eyed him steadily. “You’re free to end the process at any time, of course. But, like I said, doing so will endanger your security clearance.”

Young closed his eyes.

“Do you want to continue?”

“Yes,” Young said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Young said. “I want to continue.”

Across the table, Wray was wearing a silver-gray blazer. On her right lapel was a pin in the shape of a pinecone, cut out of a kind of black stone he didn’t recognize. If that was supposed to have some kind of meaning, he was too dumb to get the message. But he found himself staring at anyway. He could almost feel the weight of the pinecone— smell the very faint woody trace of the tree that clung to it.

He had decorated them for Christmas when he was a child, though he felt like he had never been a child, now.

Some other person had been a child, and Young, like a changeling, had crept in and taken the memories over.

He did not know where he had come from.

Maybe he had been born here. Under the earth.

 

  

**DAY FIVE**

 

“I made it through the planetary defenses in a tel’tak and touched down outside the settlement. I was pretending to be an arms dealer, peddling stolen zats to Sixth House. A contact on the planet got me in to the fortress. I was supposed to meet with one of the armorers. I got caught. They stunned me, and I woke up in a room with Colonel Telford.”

* * *

_He wakes up._

_He takes a drink of water._

_Telford tells him the truth._

 

  

_“Jesus Christ,” Young says, “did you think I was just going to_ leave _you here?”_

* * *

“The guards took me to another room. A torture chamber. Kiva was there. She drugged me with something.

* * *

_She has eyes like smoke, that sort of flat opaqueness. “I’ve never_  
_thought of David as a particularly sentimental person,” she says._  
_“But then, you know, I often find that it’s that sort of man who has_  
_one sentimental weakness. Usually a dog, or something._  
_You seem to be his dog.”_

 

_What happened to the little animals in the desert?_  
_When they set off the bomb._   

_Telford would know. He would have a story._  

_But all of his stories are sad. They’re stories about things that are_  
_broken. Things that are never going to be the same again._

_Telford in the gift shop, holding the trinitite up to the window._  
_A whole tsunami’s worth of Southwestern light coming in._  
_The glint of green between his fingers._

_Like he is holding the broken piece of one of Young’s bones._  

* * *

“Telford showed up. He was agitated. He said—“

* * *

_“I’ll do it myself. I know how to make the memories stick.”_

_“That was not what we agreed.”_

_“You_ killed _my soldiers.”_

_“I saved you from prison, I think you mean. After_ your _fuck-up. Or would they have shot you?”_

_“Oh, fuck you. You were saving your own skin.”_

_“I’m very sorry that I broke your toys. There. Is that better?”_

  

_You can buy toy soldiers in the gift shop._  
_Backs straight as the line of duty._  
_Their faces always looking straight ahead._  
_Eyes facing straight into the atomic explosion._

_Young looks up from the plastic package and_  
_sees Telford watching him, his face still and curious_  
_as though he’s waiting to see what Young will do,_  
_the way you watch a wild animal in the forest that_  
_you’re not supposed to touch, even though you’re_  
_secretly hoping that it might come closer. You_  
_try to still even the sound of your breathing. You_  
_don’t want your heartbeat to frighten it off._

 

_“David, I’m afraid I’m going to need you to leave us for a little while,” Kiva says._

* * *

“She told him to leave. She was going to torture me to death, I think. But for some reason she didn’t.”

* * *

_“What do you mean? I told you I would give him the drug; I told you—“_

_“And you will,” she says coolly. “But it’s not a terribly plausible story, is it? I mean—_   
_perhaps if he were a member of SG-1. Do you think? With their record_   
_of rather effortless salvations. Always appearing at the last moment to save_   
_the day, without any cost accruing. Or if you weren’t quite so— well._   
_You know who you are.”_

_“Oh, please,” Telford says. “Tell me who I am.”_

* * *

“I was drugged, so I don’t— I don’t remember.”

“Try.”

“Does it matter? We all know what happens next.”

“Colonel Young.”

“I mean, it doesn’t make a difference.” 

“That might be the case. But please try.”

* * *

_“It’s not a terribly plausible story, is it? I mean—_   
_perhaps if he were a member of SG-1. Do you think? With their record_   
_of rather effortless salvations. Always appearing at the last moment to save_   
_the day, without any cost accruing. Or if you weren’t quite so— well._   
_You know who you are.”_

_“Oh, please,” Telford says. “Tell me who I am.”_

_“David,” Young whispers._   
_But he doesn’t know if this is David._   
_He doesn’t even know who David is._

_“There’s also the fact that it’s such a demoralizing story, from my_   
_perspective. A single Tau’ri officer — middle-aged, no less;_   
_some no-name colonel— infiltrates my fortress, frees one of my_   
_highest-profile prisoners, and escapes without a scratch on him?_   
_Well. Your people wouldn’t believe it, quite rightly, but everyone else would._   
_And that won’t do.”_

_“He won’t have a scratch on him, but I will. Just like I offered.”_

_“Yes. You offered. But, you see, we’d made such a nice plan. A way to slip you_   
_right back into the Tau'ri nest. But you got so skittish. I’d never_   
_imagined you as skittish. Suddenly you wanted to change the plan._   
_But I like the plan we made, David. It solves so many problems._   
_Not least of all that: once you’ve done this, I won’t have to worry_   
_about your loyalties any longer. All your dull, constant, tiresome angst._   
_What’s the Tau’ri expression? ‘Burning one’s bridges.’ ‘Striking the glyphs,’_   
_is what we say. So that you can never go back through the gate,_   
_you see. We’ve been a spacefaring people for a very long time. We know_   
_about the weight of distance. And about the freedom it brings."_

_“When am I going to meet your parents?” Young asks_  
_one night, when they’re at Frontier, dipping fries in chile,_  
_a little before one AM. It’s always struck him as weird_  
_that they hang out in Albuquerque all the time, but he’s_  
_never met any of Telford’s family. Telford never talks about_  
_them. At first Young thought maybe his parents were dead,_  
_but he saw Telford list their phone numbers on a form once._

_Telford looks down, dragging a soggy fry in slow circles_  
_through a bowl of green chile. He says, “We’re not close.”_

_“Oh,” Young says. He’s trying to imagine what Telford_  
_means by that, why he wouldn’t be close with his family,_  
_or why he wouldn’t be close in the way that would make_  
_him say, “We’re not close” like that he’d said it, like it was_  
_the end of the subject. There are plenty of people on base_  
_who hate Telford, because he rubs people the wrong way_  
_sometimes, but it’s hard for Young to imagine a set of parents_  
_he wouldn’t get along with. He’s smart— one of the smartest people_  
_Young’s ever met, probably, even though he keeps it under his hat—_  
_but he’s also tough. Hell, he’s an officer in the Air Force. He’s_  
_determined and resourceful. He’s got grit. He always gives the perfect_  
_gifts, the things you didn’t even know you wanted. He’s good at parties._  
_He’s great at small talk. And he makes it all seem effortless, this_  
_whole thing he’s got going, the art of being everything to everyone._

* * *

“I think I’m getting some kind of— bleed-through. Sorry. I keep remembering something else. You’re not seeing that, are you?”

“It’s okay. Just try to focus.”

* * *

_“Perhaps if he were a member of SG-1. Do you think? With their record_   
_of rather effortless salvations. Always appearing at the last moment to save_   
_the day, without any cost accruing. Or if you weren’t quite so— well._   
_You know who you are.”_

_“Oh, please,” Telford says. “Tell me who I am.”_

_“David,” Young whispers._   
_But he doesn’t know if this is David._   
_He doesn’t even know who David is._

_“There’s also the fact that it’s such a demoralizing story, from my_   
_perspective. A single Tau’ri officer — middle-aged, no less;_   
_some no-name colonel— infiltrates my fortress, frees one of my_   
_highest-profile prisoners, and escapes without a scratch on him?_   
_Well. Your people wouldn’t believe it, quite rightly, but everyone else would._   
_And that won’t do.”_

_“He won’t have a scratch on him, but I will. Just like I offered.”_

_“Yes. You offered. But, you see, we’d made such a nice plan. A way to slip you_   
_right back into the Tau'ri nest. But you got so skittish. I’d never_   
_imagined you as skittish. Suddenly you wanted to change the plan._   
_But I like the plan we made, David. It solves so many problems._   
_Not least of all that: once you’ve done this, I won’t have to worry_   
_about your loyalties any longer. All your dull, constant, tiresome angst._   
_What’s the Tau’ri expression? ‘Burning one’s bridges.’ ‘Striking the glyphs,’_   
_is what we say. So that you can never go back through the gate,_   
_you see. We’ve been a spacefaring people for a very long time. We know_   
_about the weight of distance. And about the freedom it brings.”_

_“I just,” Telford says. He’s still staring fixedly at the table,_  
_his left hand grinding the french fry into the bowl_  
_like it’s one of his unfiltered cigarettes. “Had a complicated childhood.”_

_“I can’t imagine you as a kid,” Young says._

 

_“I know I fucked up,” Telford says. “I know I did. You want me_  
_to prove my loyalty? My commitment? I’ll do it.”_

_“What I want is for you to leave.”_

_“I can’t do that.”_

_“David. Please don’t think that you can test me. Things are going_  
_to happen in this room that I don’t want for you to see.”_

 

_“I’m not a fucking child. You don’t get to talk to me like that.”_

 

_Telford flashes a smile at him. “You can’t? I can imagine you._  
_In your little cowboy boots. In the sagebrush.”_

_“I used to hunt for dinosaur bones,” Young says._

_“Oh, my God. It’s like you read an encyclopedia entry_  
_about Wyoming and thought it was an instruction_  
_manual.” Telford seemed to have relaxed,_  
_now that they’re not talking about his childhood._

_“Hey, I found some.”_

_“Of course you did.”_

* * *

“I’m sorry; I’m having a really hard time concentrating.”

“We can give you another dose of the anti-inhibitor.”

“No, that’s okay.”

“We usually find that the memories people struggle to recall are the most unpleasant. Your mind actively wants to forget.”

“The most unpleasant? You mean worse than having half the bones on the right side of my body broken?”

“I’m just telling you what we’ve seen in the past.”

“All right, well, I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.”

“I understand. Please continue.”

* * *

_“Oh, please,” Telford says. “Tell me who I am.”_

  _“David,” Young whispers._  
_But he doesn’t know if this is David._  
_He doesn’t even know who David is._  

_“There’s also the fact that it’s such a demoralizing story, from my_   
_perspective. A single Tau’ri officer — middle-aged, no less;_   
_some no-name colonel— infiltrates my fortress, frees one of my_   
_highest-profile prisoners, and escapes without a scratch on him?_   
_Well. Your people wouldn’t believe it, quite rightly, but everyone else would._   
_And that won’t do.”_

_“He won’t have a scratch on him, but I will. Just like I offered.”_

_“Yes. You offered. But, you see, we’d made such a nice plan. A way to slip you_   
_right back into the Tau'ri nest. But you got so skittish. I’d never_   
_imagined you as skittish. Suddenly you wanted to change the plan._   
_But I like the plan we made, David. It solves so many problems._   
_Not least of all that: once you’ve done this, I won’t have to worry_   
_about your loyalties any longer. All your dull, constant, tiresome angst._   
_What’s the Tau’ri expression? ‘Burning one’s bridges.’ ‘Striking the glyphs,’_   
_is what we say. So that you can never go back through the gate,_   
_you see. We’ve been a spacefaring people for a very long time. We know_   
_about the weight of distance. And about the freedom it brings.”_

_Telford says, “You know, we do have dinosaur bones in New Mexico.”_

_“Yeah, but have you ever found any?”_

_Telford shakes his head. “Nope. Only radioactive debris.”_

_“You’re shitting me.”_

_“Nope. They did radiolanthanum test shots down in Bayo Canyon._  
_You can still find little pieces of the lab if you spend enough time_  
_looking. There’s even markers— you know, ‘Don’t dig this up for another_  
_few hundred years.’ The plants that grow down there are poisoned, but_  
_you’d never know it. They look just like the other plants.”_

_“Radioactive chamisas,” Young says. He’s heard this story._

   

_“I know I fucked up,” Telford says. “I know I did. You want me_  
_to prove my loyalty? My commitment? I’ll do it.”_

_“What I want is for you to leave.”_

_“I can’t do that.”_

_“David. Please don’t think that you can test me. Things are going_  
_to happen in this room that I don’t want for you to see.”_

_“I’m not a fucking child. You don’t get to talk to me like that.”_

 

_“Right. Their roots are built to look for water. But the only water_  
_they could find was liquid radioactive waste.”_

  

_“You don’t leave me with many options,” Kiva says._

_Telford adopts an ingratiating expression that Young recognizes. “Look—_  
_there are other alternatives here. You can rough him up a little._  
_Break a leg, or a leg and a hand. Make it look like he had to_  
_work for it, escaping. Whatever you need to save your dignity._  
_You don’t have to kill him.”_

   

_Did he think about it then? Is that when the image was planted?_

_Telford, bare-backed, striking the auger harder and harder._

   

_“You can rough him up a little,” Telford says, without looking at Young._  
_His expression is indifferent, as though Young’s not there._  
_“Break a leg, or a leg and a hand. Make it look like he had to_  
_work for it, escaping. Whatever you need to save your dignity._  
_You don’t have to kill him.”_  

_Kiva eyes him like a cat. “It’s an interesting proposition.”_  

_“I would owe you.”_  

_“How much would you owe me?”_  

_“You already have my loyalty,” Telford says._  

_“And yet you don’t leave when I ask you to leave,” she points out._  

_“I will. I will, if we have a deal.”_

 

_The way that he had pictured Telford digging a well when they_  
_were pushed up against the wall, doing what he didn’t yet call_  
_fucking, because he didn’t have a word for what it was._  
_The way that Telford’s hands had dug into him, wet with sweat_  
_and hot and clumsy, unable to ever really get a solid grasp,_  
_but still groping at him, trying._

  

_“I accept your terms,” Kiva says._

_“Swear to me.”_

 

_Think about something else._

_Chert, agate, and jasper._

_Telford holding the chunk of trinitite in his hand._

_Green glass in the tsunami of Southwestern sunlight._

_Straight as the line of duty for the toy soldiers._

_What happened to the little animals in the desert?_

_Their bones turned to glass._

_Like other things that died in the late Cretaceous._

_Young looks up from the plastic package and_  
_sees Telford watching him, his face still and curious_  
_as though he’s waiting to see what Young will do._

_The pores of the bones open, waiting for the atomic explosion,_  
_waiting for the atoms to alter, waiting for the tsunami of light to rush in._

  

_“Swear to me,” Telford says intensely. “Swear. Swear. Swear it.”_

 

_The old bodies—_

  

_“I swear. Your Stargate officer lives.”_

* * *

There was silence in the interrogation room when Young paused.

He stared at his hands, folded on the table. “What did you see?” he asked in a low voice. He was aware that some part of the partition of his mind had failed in the midst of that memory. He had made the mistake of thinking about it; he’d made the mistake of letting himself know. He couldn’t say, at that exact moment, what bothered him more: the idea of everyone at the table seeing him and Telford fucking, or the fact that they knew that Telford had said, “Break a leg. Or a leg and a hand. Make it look like he had to work for it, escaping.” He didn’t want to look at them, because their faces would tell him how they thought he ought to feel about either thing, or the two things together, and he didn’t want to be told how to feel. He didn’t feel anything at all.

Davis took a beat to answer the question. “Nothing,” he said finally, looking up. His eyes held Young’s for a moment. “Nothing unusual. Your recall is continuing to register as more consistent. You’ve made significant improvements over the course of the last few days. If you’re ready, you can continue.” 

“I don’t know if there’s anything else to say. I think we’ve about covered it.”

“I’d like you to continue.”

Young closed his eyes behind the shield of the glasses. “Telford left. Then she tortured me.”

* * *

_He aspirates on the blood and for a moment he’s choking._

_He pictures one of David’s chamisas._

_He pictures the explosion._

_He can taste what David gave him. The water is hard to swallow._

_It is unpleasant water. Raw and red._  

* * *

“After that, Telford gave me the drug.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That’s not what happened next.”

* * *

_“Tell me about Wyoming,” Telford whispers._

* * *

“I don’t know what happened next.”

“Try to remember.”

* * *

_Someone’s fingers stroke the little wisps of hair back from his forehead._

* * *

“That’s not real. What I’m remembering. It didn’t happen.” 

“Yes. Your recall isn’t doubled. It did.”

* * *

_Someone’s fingers stroke the little wisps of hair back from his forehead._

_Before there’s a him that can think about whether or not the touch is a good feeling, there’s just the fact of the body and the touch. His body, hurting. Then, gradually, the idea that the body that is hurting is him._  

* * *

“No. I don’t— want to talk about this.”

* * *

_The person touching him is Telford._  

_Young blinks at him with leaden eyelids._

_Telford looks terrible._

* * *

“I don’t—“

“Try.”

* * *

_“Hey,” Telford whispers._  
_Then he has to stop and press his lips together, looking up and to the side, because his eyes are damp._  
_It’s an expression that isn’t part of his limited repertoire of expressions. The three or four that he always_  
_uses to communicate as much of himself as he lets people see._

_Young’s never seen Telford like this— never seen him shaken._  
_He’s always thought of Telford as a kind of granite boulder._  
_You’d have to split him open to move him. And the machinery_  
_didn’t exist that could do the job._   

_“David,” Young says vaguely._

_“Yeah. It’s me.”_

_“What happened?”_

_This time, Telford turns away completely. He stands up from where he’s been kneeling next to the divan_  
_where Young is lying and puts his back to Young, his arms crossed over his head like he’s a statue_  
_in a church whose purpose is to show the sin of desolation. “It’s going to be okay,” he says, his voice cracking._

_But Young doesn’t think it is._

_“You told her to break my leg,” he says, the memory coming back to him._

_“I’m going to get you out of here,” Telford says, louder, like he can drown Young out. “I’m going to_  
_take you home; it’s going to be okay.”_

_What Young wants to say is:_ You told her to break my leg, and she did.  
_But he’s so tired, and beyond the damage to his body, what he feels is_  
_a sense of aloneness so painful and intense that it’s as though he is the_  
_only creature ever made by God to suffer. The pain wells and wells up inside_  
_him, but there is no one to communicate it to, and so, in the end, it stays there_  
_and sets, like mineral water turning into rock inside the microscopic pores of his bones._

_He makes a despairing noise._

 

_Telford makes a despairing noise._

 

_“I think she did something really bad to me,” Young says. His voice is a_  
_stupid child’s voice. “I can’t feel my legs. I don’t want to live like this, David.”_

_“Don’t say that. You do. You do. It’s going to be okay.”_

_Suddenly Telford is there again, not just kneeling next to the divan but trying to_  
_make himself small enough to fit on it, right next to Young. He touches the side_  
_of Young’s face, which is one of the only parts of Young’s body that doesn’t hurt._

_Young closes his eyes and leans into the touch. “Fuck you,” he whispers,_  
_his voice shaking. “Why? Just tell me why? Why? Why? I don’t understand.”_

_Telford gives a little shake of his head. “I’m sorry,” he says in a wavering_  
_voice. “I just— though I could fix things. I wanted to keep everybody alive.”_  

_“Who are you? Who_ are _you? Did I ever even know you?”_  

_Telford’s mouth does something complicated, warping of its own accord. He says,_  
_sounding helpless, “I wanted you to.”_  

_“I don’t—“ All Young can do is say the most obvious things, sounding as_  
_bewildered as a little kid. “I don’t understand what I did to you._  
_Why you would do this to me?”_

_“To save your_ life. _” Telford’s hand is still against Young’s face; it tenses for_  
_a moment, like it’s trying to communicate something to him. “And I did. I_ did _save_  
_your life. You’re going to be okay. You won’t remember it hurting. It won’t_  
_ever have happened. You’ll be okay. You’ll have a whole life on Earth.”_  

_Young can’t figure out how to respond to that. He just shakes his head mutely._  
_He feels as though he has a stone for a heart._  

_“You will,” Telford whispers. “I promise. You’ll hate me, I think, but you’ll be out of it._  
_Out of all of this. It’s better that way. You can go back to Wyoming. To the mountains._  
_Raise horses, or something.”_  

_In spite of everything, Young’s instinct is to laugh. Instead, what_  
_comes out is a choked sob that he can barely breathe through._  
_“I should’ve never left Wyoming,” he murmurs._  

_“I know,” Telford whispers, his voice wet. His hand comes up and very_  
_tenderly smooths down Young’s hair. “Tell me about it. About Wyoming.”_  

_“You’ve been there,” Young points out. “You were at my wedding.”_

_Something in Telford’s face flinches, before he forces a painful smile._  
_“Correct. I have been there. To the Young family homestead, to the_  
_little house on the— well, not the little house on the prairie.”_  

_“No,” Young agrees muzzily. “Little house in the Bighorns.”_  

_“I gotta say, it didn’t seem so great to me. What are there, like five restaurants in Buffalo?”_  

_“But the hills,” Young says, his voice drifting._  
_“There are so many animals up in the hills.” He closes_  
_his eyes, lulled by the stroking touch of Telford’s fingers._  
_“Antelope, sheep, and deer… elk… eagles. Lots of eagles.”_

_“But no actual buffalo.”_  

_“No buffalo,” Young says. “Just… antelope. Pronghorns. I_  
_used to love that. Being out in the mountains, someplace so still_  
_you can hear your breath… it’s the only time I ever felt like I was_  
_allowed to fill up my body. The rest of the time I was always just… compressed._  
_It’s hard to take up space around other people. I was always the third- or fourth-best_  
_at everything. But animals… don’t understand third-best. You’re there and they’re there,_  
_alive, just alive, so alive, two animals looking at each other, amazed that something else_  
_in this world is alive, and that’s… the only time I’ve ever really been happy, I think.”_  

_“That’s not true.”_  

_Young gives a weak half-laugh. “Why would I fucking lie?”_  

_Telford doesn’t say anything at first. Then he says, with a quiet intensity,_  
_“It’ll get better. You’ll see. I know you don’t think it will, but_  
_it’ll be better after I— if you don’t have to remember._  
_You’ll go back to Earth, and you’ll have a life._  
_I’m going to fix things for you. I’m going to fix everything.”_  

_He is so close that Young can feel the heat of his body, even though_  
_Telford has been careful not to touch him anywhere that it might hurt._  

_They are like two animals curled together._  

_Curved, like the line of beauty._  

_Close enough that when Young turns his head fractionally_  
_they’re nose to nose: finally sharing a bed._

 

_A cloud of knowledge wanders around the room and settles._

_Young knows then that he’d been in love with Telford, and_  
_that he isn’t— that he won’t be— any longer. Knows this is_  
_something that, like all the rest of it, he’s going to forget._  
_The love and the way that the love had retreated_  
_like a tsunami that was never going to come back in._

_He should want to forget. Anyone would. People would_  
_pay for the privilege. But in his whole life he doesn’t_  
_think he’s ever once had a clear picture of himself_  
_as someone who is capable of love. Now he will go on_  
_thinking this, like a pianist raised in a house without_  
_a keyboard, every day thinking that there must be_  
_something that he was really good at, something_  
_he had a gift for, but never finding anything that fit._

 

_“David,” he whispers, “please don’t do this to me.”_

_Telford closes his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says hoarsely. “But I want you to live.”_

* * *

Young took a long, shuddering breath and stared at the table.

No one said anything. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Young said at last, flatly. “Why he did it. He would’ve killed anyone else. Good people. People who risked their lives to save him. Am I supposed to feel grateful just because he got sentimental for five minutes?”

He looked up: at Wray, at Davis, at the unspeaking NID agent, daring them to answer the question. They didn’t.

“I didn’t walk again for more than a month,” Young said. “Am I supposed to be grateful for that? For a second chance to get fucked over?”

Davis’s eyes met his for a moment, impassive, before returning to the computer. “I don’t think you’re supposed to feel anything,” he said.

Young jerked himself backwards in his chair, a suppressed line of fury. “Good. Because I _don’t_ feel grateful. I’m not going to thank him for making me his fucking dog.”

“Kiva said that,” Wray said— unexpectedly breaking her silence.

 Young transferred his confrontational stare to her. “So?”

Her expression was the same as Davis’s: just a little too neutral. “It’s not uncommon for torturers to try to make their victims feel less human. I’ve had survivors tell me about being led around on leashes and made to fetch. It’s a technique that’s consistent with the comment you reported.”

Young glared at her. “Thanks,” he said. “That’s definitely a piece of dime-store psychology I didn’t hear in Special Forces training.”

She shrugged crisply. “You can take it or leave it. I suggest saving it until you find that you need it.” 

Young wanted to hit her, in that instant. He considered walking out of the room. He considered walking out of the Mountain, saying _fuck it_ to the whole goddamn Stargate organization, to the Air Force, the fucking Armed Forces, all of it. He wouldn’t go back home, even. He’d just keep walking. He wouldn’t have to _be_ anyone. He could leach the despair out from his bones, where it’d set up residence.

His legs actually tensed with the effort required to stay sitting.

He wished that he hadn’t remembered.

“Are we done here?” he asked in a low, controlled voice.

“You haven’t finished the narrative,” Davis said.

* * *

And so, of course, he has to talk through the rest of it, which he knows already: the red raw spread of blood in water; the tel’tak; the knife sinking into Telford’s skin.

* * *

_“It won’t hurt,” David says. His voice cracks. He swallows._

* * *

_“Perhaps we could’ve gotten your friend to do it. I’m sure he’d be more than happy to, at this point. After what you’ve done to him.”_

* * *

“By the time we hit deep space—“

“No. You’re still missing something.”

“I really don’t think I am.”

“Try again, please.”

* * *

_“It won’t hurt,” David says. His voice cracks. He swallows._

_Blood swirls in the barrel of the syringe._

_And it doesn’t hurt._

_“Just go to sleep,” Telford says._

* * *

“He told me to sleep.”

 “No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

* * *

" _It won’t hurt,” David says. His voice cracks. He swallows._

_Blood swirls in the barrel of the syringe._

_And it doesn’t hurt._

_The absence of being hurt is enough to make Young’s eyes hot._

_“Just go to sleep—“_

* * *

“—he said.”

“No.”

* * *

_“It won’t hurt,” David says. His voice cracks. He swallows._    
  
_Blood swirls in the barrel of the syringe._  
  
_And it doesn’t hurt._  
  
_The absence of being hurt is enough to make Young’s eyes hot._  
  
_He squeezes them shut against the threat of crying._

_“What happens now?” he asks on a rush of breath._

_His head is resting in Telford’s lap, though he doesn’t remember how_  
_this happened. Maybe the drug is working already. Maybe he’s starting to forget._  
_It’s a good feeling. Resting here with Telford. Like this._

_“Shh,” Telford says. “Just go to sleep.”_

* * *

“That wasn’t what he said,” Young said, his voice cracking.

There it was: the last pathetic scrap of this whole pathetic story. He would scrape it out of the bottom of his mind so that nothing would remain, no stray ghost thoughts that might one day split their casings and send out phantom shoots of the man he had been. The man he’d thought he had been; the man he’d been becoming.

* * *

_“Shh,” Telford says quietly. “You can sleep in a second. Just let me tell you a story.”_

 

_Telford has never touched him like this._

 

_“It’s a good one. I promise.”_

 

_This is the most they’ve ever touched. Just— the most._

 

_“You have to listen really closely.”_

_His hand on the thin skin of Young’s wrist, resting against_  
_the pulse there. The image comes, irrational and arresting:_  
_Telford kneeling out in the low grass, his ear pressed to_  
_the earth, listening for the water he knows is there._  
_In the dark. Underneath. Where he won’t ever reach it._

 

_Young whispers, his throat unaccountably tight, “But all of your stories are sad.”_


	48. Coda, Pt. 1

In the beginning was the—

 

                                 He was listening for a bell that had not been rung yet.

                                 He did not know how to bring these two things together in his mind.

                                 Bells and time.

                                 Bells and time.

                                 Much less let them rest there forever.

_Alif._

He was in a room. He was in a room, and he knew this. He did not like that the room was brightly coloured, with bleak little cut-from-construction-paper trees pasted on the walls; it made him think in a vague and sourceless manner of other rooms that smelt of old milk and tea left too long in the pot, rooms with Lemon Puff biscuits ground into the flat carpet, rooms where a person hummed tunelessly and rocked back and forth, rooms where a person overheard the woman from the council say that children didn’t act this way, which was useful, really, as a metric. A person could rely on other people to tell them who and what they were. Or were not.

                                 Ringing the changes. That was what it was called.

                                 He could almost hear it: reverberating as blue as Cherenkov radiation.

                                 It happened at the heart of nuclear reactors. The atoms blew apart like burst stars.

                                 Their pieces propagated faster than light in the water. So what you saw was the debris cloud, the pieces that would not  
                                 come back together. They were luminiferous, meaning: they carried their own light with them. Though this is an  
                                 unscientific way to say so; really, they _were_ the light.

                                 They were the colour of the fish that move at unsurvivable depths underwater, fish that don’t look like fish.

_Bat._

He was sat at a piano, and he knew how to play a piano. You never forgot that kind of thing. Amnesia might eat away at the narrative impulse, leaving only the last paragraph of the story to be puzzled over, its sentences redolent of an unseen and irrecoverable import, but this— the work of the body— resisted. There had been a famous case: Clive Wearing, the Lassus scholar. In the end, nothing of him had remained except this much: that he could play the piano. So what did it mean; what did it mean to be a person? What did it mean to be a person who was sat at a piano?

                                 He knew what it was to be a string: to be a wire strung tight between two points.

_Bridging the slender difference of two stars._

                                 And he knew what it was to be the sound that travelled through it.

He touched a finger to the cool plane of a piano key’s surface.

_Simma._

                                                                  “Nick,” Gloria said.

                                 Who was Nick?

He was aware that other people were in the room, but he was not particularly interested in these other people. For such a long time, he thought, other people had not been particularly interested in him. This seemed the proper order of the world, and he was not impelled to disturb it. In general, he was in favor of disturbing order; but this particular delicate balance held a limited attraction for him. Might he have _forced_ their interest, or at least their attention? Yes, he thought. And no. And yes.

He had learnt that particular lesson.

_Det._

                                 He dreamt sometimes that he was a hydrogen isotope.

                                 It was peaceful.

                                 He had not told the girl with the red hair this.

There had been someone who was interested, once. _You should learn_ , she had said. _You should learn to play the piano._ Pianos had not formed an especially large part of his world, back then. They were things that other people owned, things that one heard on recordings. He would have been afraid to touch one, he thought, if he were in the same room with it. As though it were an animal that might sense he did not belong, and bite him. _What_ , he’d said, _as some sort of— party trick, you mean? Because of—_ He’d gestured at himself. She’d gazed at him, uncomprehending. He’d thought she knew; he thought that everyone knew, who talked to him, since that was inevitably the reason for the talking, or as though he imagined someone were assigned to warn them, should talking happen by accident. She knew he was not an undergraduate, but then, she wasn’t either. She was twenty-two, with a career. He’d started university at sixteen and now, at nineteen, was well into his postgraduate research. He was the kind of student whom teachers hated, but for whom they made outstanding exceptions; they did not like him, but they liked his story, which catered to all of their romantic ideas about the world. At fundraisers, conferences, cocktail parties, they would produce him as though from their pockets and show off his trivial prodigiousness. He would multiply enormous numbers, recognise increasingly preposterous primes, as though this had any bearing at all upon the actual work of mathematics; and later (this had happened more than once, more than twice, n>3, n>4), he would gone home with one or more than one of them (but always men), because it was new to be looked at, (because he paid his debts), because he was practicing the exercise of power, and anyway, it wasn’t as though he minded; he had nothing to say in place of the numbers, nothing to be except prodigious.

 _No,_ she had said, _because you’d like it. And I want to talk to you about music, and there are so many things you won’t understand until you’ve actually—_ Then she, too, had gestured. He had frowned, peeved at the idea that there were things he might be prevented from understanding. _What?_ he’d asked. _Until you’ve had to fight to breath life into it,_ she’d said. _It’s like a child; it’s like a monster; you have to make it out of your own flesh._ He had thought, at the time, that she was being overdramatic, as was her nature.

_Esp._

                                 They were frightened of him. The two girls.

                                 Perhaps he had done something awful. It seemed possible. At times he would be going about the highly  
                                 circumscribed business of his day, and be hit by a pressure wave of something sick, like a scream  
                                 inside him. It wanted out. It wanted a substrate other than his body. If he did not labour intensively to keep it in, then—

                                 Problematic things happened.

_Fay._

                                 He had broken a glass. He had broken more than one glass.  
                                 She had been gone. The girl. Not the red-haired one. Colloid. Colloquial. Clepsydra. Chloe.  
                                 The glass had been in his hand, and he had needed that new substrate, a way to express the paroxysm  
                                 within himself that lacked either language or name, and so he had hurled the glass against the wall, and  
                                 it had made a sound, but it had not been the _right_ sound. So he had gotten another glass.

                                 The other girl— Galimatias— Guillemets— Gainsay— no, _Ginn_ — had stopped him, after. But she would not let him  
                                 put the glasses back together. She had swept the pieces up and tossed them into the bin. “Do not,” she had said.  
                                 “Chloe will be angered.” “I don’t give a fuck,” he had said. She had pressed her lips together. “We are guests,” she’d  
                                 reminded him. So he’d said, edgily, “Let’s go; let’s go, then; I’m going.” But they had stood there looking at each other  
                                 in the kitchen for a moment, and in the end he had not left.

His right hand found its way down the keyboard: a quiet descent into— something.

Picking one’s way through the dark, as the string unravelled. A slow movement towards the maze’s heart.

 _Gnossienne,_ he thought. The kingdom of knowledge.

                                 Later it had transpired that all of the kitchen’s electrical outlets had malfunctioned.

                                 He had formed his fingers into a fist, hiding the pale silver scar on his hand.

_Gemat._

The strings were not tuned correctly.

They could not create the notes needed. He knew the pitches very precisely. They rang in head, like a set of bells.

But strings could be retuned.

He knew how to do it. Altering the vibrations. It was easier than electromagnetic radiation.

_Et._

“Dr. Rush,” someone said.

Who? Unimportant.

Where was he? A hospital. He did not like hospitals.

“Rush,” someone said.

                                                                  Gloria said, “ _Nick._ ”

_Imma._

                                 There were too many names; was it any wonder he found them confusing?

He struck a single note, then struck it a second time.

The sound… bent.

_Every note has a particular shape._

                                 He remembered being— not-Nick.

                                 Now there was no Nick to be.

                                 Confusing.

 

_Immat._

                                                                  “Nick,” Gloria said. “Darling, you can’t ignore me forever.”

                                 He had been hearing her since he remembered the cyphers.

                                 Her voice made his head hurt.

“Dr. Rush, _please._ Let’s just leave.”

                                 He wanted to cover his ears.

_Kaf._

                                 He had not told the girl with the red hair that there had been at least one other seizure.

                                 He knew because he had bitten his lip. When he’d touched the wound, his finger had come away bloody.

                                 When he seized, he went— somewhere. Somewhere where there was no _him_. 

The sound bent.

The pitch bent.

 _There._ And now the second note.

Incomplete, but approximating.

                                 Why had he not told her?

                                 He had not _wanted_ to come to the hospital.

                                 They moved him about like he was a chess piece. Like he was in pieces. They moved him about like he was a  
                                 collection of pieces, like he was a chess set.

                                 Who? Everyone. Everyone.

                                 As though he came with a rulebook, one they only had to flip through if they wished to master him.

_Latha._

He was aware that the people in the room were unhappy with him. But people were always unhappy with him, and: fuck them. You could not please people; you _could not_ ; if you gave them the string, they would unravel the whole fucking skein of it; it was better to keep the fuck out of their hands. If you gave them nothing then they could say what they liked; they could bring out their diagnostic manuals; they could put their hand on your back while you recited the right digits at donor receptions, and they could radiate a quiet ownership; they could invite you to parties where you would be mistaken for the help; they could show you the cyphers, the cyphers, the _cyphers_ , and then— they—

They—could— do— _something_ — that— he— did— not— remember—

 

They— could— keep— tabs—on—a—

 

His head was _killing_ him.

 

                                 He dreamt sometimes that he was a debris cloud.

                                 It seemed possible.

_My._

                                 He thought that something had been done to him.

                                 More than what Ginn had said. Something she did not want him to remember.

                                 They did not want him to play the piano. But this was what was left of him.

_Enu._

                                 Was it necessary for there to be a man first, who remembered? Or did the memories come first, before there  
                                 could be a man? An interesting paradox. Interesting.

He had not _wanted_ to come to the hospital. He had not _wanted_ to go to the reception. People sunk their hooks into you, and if you wanted to get the hooks out, you had to tear them out of your own flesh; you had to be willing to bleed, because otherwise they would just keep _pulling,_ and you would be _nothing_ ; they would pull you right up out of the dark places that you had been born for, and then you would be nothing, nothing but something desperate, de-oxygenating, and ornamental, something dysfunctional, something barely recognizable as a fish.

_Ot._

                                 They moved him about like there was not a scream inside him.

He struck a chord. Then another.

_Pay._

                                 For a long time, when he’d been a child, he hadn’t talked.

                                 He hadn’t had to talk. He had fought. He had set fires. 

The sound did not sound like human music.

It scoured something away from him. A shiver of ice. An outer scraping.

_Qef._

                                 Later, of course, the words had come. He had, quote unquote, talked up a storm, a hurricane. He had  
                                 talked like a natural disaster. But still: dissatisfying, the sense that he was talking a different language,  
                                 that others could not penetrate to the tempest’s heart.

                                 It was easy to touch the inside of a fire, even though it would burn you.

                                 There was no question about what a fire meant.

_Resh._

_Listen_ , Gloria had said, and was Gloria real or was she a figment, a a spectre, an echo of his own voice bouncing off the walls of its cell, listen, listen, _listen_ , God, fuck, you _bastards_ , listen _,_ and of course he had listened, because for the first time something was speaking to _him_ , something had opened its vast great star-salted and sparsely-moleculed eye, striated with astrophysical plasma like the scarred inclusions of an agate, and it had fixed him gently in its looking’s crosshaired lens, and with the surge of comprehension that could come only from self-similarity _,_ from _being [part of] the same [thing]_ , he had understood that it was inviting him to—

He did not know what.

Did it matter?

                                 Gloria was whispering to him, her voice fast and urgent, but she was too far away for him to understand.

                                 There had been a time, hadn’t there, when she had not been so distant?

_Esk._

He thought his nose was bleeding. It didn’t seem important.

They kept trying to stop him from playing the piano, as they tried to stop him from spinning the substance of himself out in frayed edges of electromagnetic radiation; they tried to stop him from being something that lived in the wires; they tried to stop him from humming tunelessly and picking at the crumbs of biscuit; they tried to stop him from living anywhere but his body; they tried to make him talk; they tried to stop him from setting fires; they tried throwing a football at him; they turned him down like a fucking radio; they put their hands on the small of his back; they put their hands on his skin; they set him up with elocution lessons; they told him not to take elocution lessons; _People find it endearing, it adds to your mystique,_ they said; and they said, _Sir, can you ask Rush to repeat—_ ; and they put him in a cold room; they fitted him with transmitters; they stood on his back; they put him in a cell; you could rely on other people to tell you who you were, and they _told you who you were_ ; they built it into you and around you like a cage that you couldn’t get out of, except that he had found a way out of the fucking cage, and they _were not going to stop him_ , because that great dark thing spread out across the cosmos, that siphonophorous creature delicately and perviously stretched across time, had _spoken his name_ , and he had known what it was to be unbound but for the flux of his own ambitions; _Yes,_ he had thought, _yes; tell me who I am; yes._

                                 There had been a time before there was time.

                                 Things could be retuned. They could be returned.

_Taf._

The keys were hot under his hands. Or he was cold. Or both possibilities existed.

Something was burning. He was not sure if it was him.

_O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckestburning_

                                 He was a charged particle, moving through water at slightly above the phase velocity of light.

“Oh, my God,” someone said. Filaments buzzed and trembled.

                                 He was more than one charged particle. He was an atom that had been split open.

The infrastructure was failing under so much voltage. _He_ was the voltage. He was leaking energy; he was shedding sparks. There was too much of him, as ever. Much too much. As ever.

“Rush, you must _stop_ ; you are effecting electromagnetic changes that possess a considerable capacity to—“

                                 Now there was no atom left.

                                 Or if there was, it was not the same atom.

_Usp._

_“—_ think they might _notice_ someone running thirty thousand volts through a university campus, and if they come looking for—“

“— _know_ that, Chloe Armstrong, but what do you suggest I—“

                                 Could he go back to being the atom?

                                 He did not think so.

“— would you rather, that he gets _upset_ or that the _police—“_

                                 But if he stopped trying to hold himself together, he could repair the defects of other kinds of things.  
                                 Repurpose his particles. Redistribute his pieces.

                                 Somewhere there was a hole in the world.

                                 A lock that he had been made to fit.

He could _almost_ hear—

“Rush, _please_. Please. _Rush._ If you do not _stop_ , then I will have to—“

_Vaya._

Someone gripped his hand hard and wrenched it backwards.

He made a startled, pained noise.

“I’m sorry,” someone said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—“

His instinct was to shove whomever-it-was away, even before the conscious thought arrived that he did not want to be touched, that he would not, he _would not_ allow other people to restrain him; the act itself, alone, the pressure, the tactile sensation, caused chemicals to surge through his body, activating synapses in the sympathetic nervous system, creating a sympatho-adrenal response, until his whole consciousness was hung on ganglial threads, and he lashed out, trying to get back to the instrument or trying to get back to where the music lived, because he _needed_ it, needed it to unlock something of which he alone could not ever achieve the unlocking, a lock aware that it was locked and aching for impalement by the key. Please, he thought. Please. Please.

But now that the music had stopped, his head was exprobing. Neurons shivered in spasms of light and auroras. He was too hot. He tasted salt. He tasted the city of Utrecht. His body seemed to have no mass. He felt sick and then he felt hot and then he felt sick and then he felt that there was something attached to his temporals, and he had to get it off, because it was _holding him here_ , suspirating him in the act of dissolution; he was a comet and it was skewering him against the dielectric cormorant-coloured quantum-grained sky, in violation of the locks of physics; but he was made of ice and rock and he was losing his iambs and goading nowhere and if he stated then there would be nothing left; there would be nothing, _nothing,_ but he could not gist his halves to the lock on his handsels and the northwest passage in the rubaiyat filled him with panharmonics and he semiquavered “St— st—“

                                 Setiferous

“You have to do something!”

                                 Sideromancy

                                 Stoccado

“If I—“

                                 Stoccado

                                 Stillatitious

                                 Stoccado

“Unconscious is better than—“

                                 St—

                                 St—

                                 St—

                                 St—

 

 

 

He                             stopped.

 

* * *

_He—_

 

_is._

 

 _In the—_  

 

_dark._

  

_He_

 

_is_

 

_not_

 

_alone._

 

_Hecan’tquite—_

 

_what’sthe—_

 

_word the_

 

_“…”_

_“Are you—“_

_“…”_

 

_Someone else_

_he pulls on_

_like a thread_

_because_ he _is not_

_a ball of thread anylonger._

 

_He has lost—coherence._

 

_He cannot hold himself—_

 

_The organism wanted to continue._

 

_But now he can’t seem to untiethe thread._

  

_Or would he fall apart if he did?_

_Like the girl with the green ribbon._

_Incroyable._  

_He picks at the knot but he cannot—he cannot—_

 

_st—_

 

_st—_

 

_st—_

 

_st—_

 

* * *

_Brassy notes of a_ Star Trek _theme from the flatscreen television._

_“Rush,” Ginn calls. “Explain me the means by which the sound waves of these ships propagate in space!”_

_“It’s fiction.”_

_“I know that it is fiction.”_

_His head hurts._

_His vision is pinpricked with sparks._

_“In that case, I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.”_

_Water achieving vaporisation on the stovetop. The phase change fizzes at him. The atoms dispersing. This is_  
_called boiling. He is boiling. No. He is cold. He is—_

_Tea._

_“Is it a common Tau’ri belief that such an engineering feat is possible?”_

_What is possible is that he is going to pass out. But if he passes out, the girl, the girl with the dark hair, the girl_  
_with the broken tooth, the girl, the_ girl _, why can’t he recall her name— She will look at him and the_ girl _will look_  
_at him as though he has sprung an axle, as though he is not fit for purpose, or they will look at him as though they_  
_are afraid. Why are they afraid of him?_

_It’s possible that he has done something terrible. But he doesn’t remember._

_He wants to go. He wants to go, go, go. This house is a cage of wiring and all wires ultimately lead to his head._  
_Someone put a scream inside his body and he cannot seem to get it out. The inside of the body is supposed to be_  
_soundless, like space. His, however, is not._

 _Since he woke up, all of the sounds have been wrong. The scream. The wrong speech. The pitches that aren’t pitches,_  
_that always sound ever so slightly out of tune._

_“Rush?”_

_He startles, and put his back against the wall by instinct— so rapidly that there is an audible thud. “I—“ he says._  
_But he can’t remember the question. “Yes?”_

_Ginn peers at him uncertainly, her face framed by the kitchen doorway. She pauses. “…Nothing,” she says at last._

_Yesterday he’d overheard her tell the other girl,_ He is so sizably bettered already; do you not think so?

_But some mornings he wakes up and doesn’t know who he is._

* * *

                                 He woke, and for a time that was the extent of what he did.

  

                                 At length, his mind unstuck itself from the silt of his body.

                                 But still he was down in the riverbed of himself.

 

“Rush?”

 

A face.

 

A mouth, moving.

 

Spigot—

sparse—

spectre—

 spasm—

spasm—

 

Speech.

How did she—

_Speak the speech I pray you_  
_Speak thou Earth thou_  

_How?_

Speak thou _Earth_ thou.

But it wouldn’t.

 

It wouldn’t.

 

It wouldn’t.

 

It wouldn’t.

 

It wouldn’t.

 

It wouldn’t.

 

It wouldn’t.  

Plaint, he thought desperately.

 Plaint. Plaint. Pluvial. Plaint.

Plaint.

Plaint.

Pleiades.

_Please._

“… _Please_ ,”he choked out at last.

A burn of water debarked his— his— his—his eye’s corner.

“Rush, you are all right. You are _all right_. Please do not have panic. I ceased your higher brain functions to prevent you from seizuring. I am returning them. It will take a moment. You must be patient.”

“No,” he said. Unsteady. “ _No._ No. No. No. No. No. No. _No_.”

“At once is too great a shock. It will risk another seizure.”

 

He tried to—

 

“ _Please_ ,” he said again. His voice chattermarking. Congelifracting.

He could not move his fingers.

He could not make himself speak.

  

Someone was scr—

Without the manifestation of L- or T-waves.

He thought that it was him.

He was sh— _aking._

 

Shaking.

 

He felt cold.

He felt sick.

 

Soon they would put the needle in him.

His breath st—strophe— st—st— stunt—strophe—

It was an experiment. It was an experiment.

 

“What?” the girl said.

He must’ve made a noise.

 

What?

He didn’t know.

 

You’re _hurting_ me, was what he wanted to say.

But he was not hurt. He was just—

  

A chess piece who had dreamt it was a man. 

 

He wondered if being a chess piece was so different to being human.

 

                                 In a moment of clarity, he thought to himself: I’m tired of this.

 

“She’s not picking up.” A different girl. “Should I leave a message?”

“Do not create an incriminating metadata tail.”

“It’s not like I’m going to say on her voicemail that I’m harboring intergalactic— Oh, hi, Ms. Wray, this is Chloe Armstrong; it’s been a while since we’ve spoken, and last time we talked, I mentioned that I was interested in continuing my work with the IOA. I just wanted to touch base with you and see if you could make any suggestions about who I might want to talk with. Obviously, I know you’re busy, but I would love to hear from you, so give me a call if you get the chance! Um. Maybe on a secure line. Okay, bye! –Well, fingers crossed, she’ll call me back.”

“And if she does not?”

 

Tired.

His hand stirred a little on the velvet of the sofa.

  

“I mean— if worst came to worst, we could go to Virginia, I guess, but my mom would ask a lot of questions. Or New York, but we would have to get him on a train. Can he get on a train?”

“I don’t know, Chloe Armstrong. I am coding. Leave me alone.”

“I’m just saying, if—“

 

He dug his nails into the velvet.

Idly, he envisioned clawing through its surface. Ripping the cushions apart with his bare hands.

Something inexhaustible within him was chewing its own knuckles bloody.

But the furniture was no more than a piece of furniture, not unlike him. So instead he swallowed. In a voice like a snapped bone scraped of marrow, he said, “I’m going to be sick.”

 

He was sick.

 

Some further measure of sentience returned as he was heaving his guts into a lime-green wastepaper bin. He had made his way to the floor, a more secure location than the sofa.

His eyes were hot. His hair was frayed and wet against his face. Breathing hurt. But his neurons were his own. Unmuted.

_Listen._

He lay against the floorboards for a time, as limp as an animal carcass. His head felt like a broken eggshell. He pressed his cheek to the wood and waited for the apex of his misery to pass. The panic had crested already; gradually, it receded. In its place was something that was not wholly human. He thought darkly to himself that this at least was a triumph; they could stop him from being more than human, but they could not stop him from being less. See: the more they worked to prevent the one thing, the more they got of the other. It was the kind of battle he liked best: one in which victory was assured by the fact that he would win if he didn’t get hurt and he would win if he did; he had learned a long time ago that if you were willing to let people hurt you, there were very few battles that you couldn’t win.

But he could not hear the music, which he did not like. And he was hollow, brittle, bruised from the inside. Full of horror. He wanted the world to go away when he closed his eyes.

“Rush?” one of the girls said. Tentative.

A hand touched his ankle.

He reacted badly, scrabbling back against the wall and lashing out with a blind foot.

“Don’t,” he bit out, panting. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

Two sets of solemn eyes regarded him with a sense of worry.

He wiped an unsteady hand across his mouth. He still felt sick.

“Are you okay?” the dark-haired girl said. Chloe.

Chloe. The name slammed into him; neurons fired; and—

_The deep grey, first-Darjeeling-flush of a rainy morning. He sits at the kitchen table, scouring what is left of his mind for the cyphertext. It is hard for him to hold a pen, because his hands tremble. The black line of the wet ink wavers, like all of his numbers have been written at sea. He flexes his fingers; spreads them out like a starfish and tries to hold them steady._

_The girl clears her throat, and his whole body spasms. His arm jerks, knocking over the tea cup that sits just to his left. The last of the tea spills: a dull and muddy sluice over the page, soaking the shaky chicken-scratch of his notes._

_“Sorry!“ the girl says. “I didn’t mean to—“_

_“Fuck,” he says. “Fuck,_ fuck— _“_

_His instinct is to pick the pages up, in an attempt to salvage something. He flaps them somewhat uselessly, trying to dry them off. But his unsteady hand can’t keep hold of them, and the pages scatter: borne aloft by the turbulent flow of air currents, then descending leaf-like to the lino. He balls up his fist in impotent frustration and says again, “Fuck.”_

_“—Sorry,” the girl says again after a pause. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”_

_“You didn’t_ scare _me. I was simply—“_

_She finishes: “—Trying to work on the cyphers before Ginn wakes up.”_

_He narrows his eyes at her._

_She sighs, and pushes the dark glossy slope of her hair behind an ear. She’s clad in a golden sweater made from some angora material, and a crisp white blouse underneath it; her eyes have been very precisely outlined in dark brown, and there are pearls in her ears. He is conscious of the fact that he himself is wearing jeans that the bloodstains have never quite come out of, and an overlarge cardigan whose sleeves he had stretched out so that he could hide his hands in the cuffs._

_“It’s pretty obvious,” the girl says, “that you’re the type of person who does whatever he wants to. But you should listen to her. She knows what she’s talking about, I think.”_

_He ignores her and bends down to collect the paper._

_“She’s trying to protect you.”_

_“No one asked her to do that,” he says, his voice low and perhaps a little bit vicious._

_He wishes that she would leave. He wishes that he were alone. When he is around other people, he must remember what he has and hasn’t told them, what impression he is trying to give. This is difficult when they keep adding and subtracting bits from him._

_He feels like a child, clumsily prying at the wet pieces of paper. Pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his elbow. Fruitlessly scraping his cardigan sleeves up his forearms, only for them to droop back down. He feels small and grubby and pathetic. He feels like a child in front of this child._

_He doesn’t remember, at the moment, why the idea of being a child fills him with such fury._

_Trying to think about it makes his head hurt._

_Taste of rain in the air. Taste of Ice Age Carbon. He can’t breathe. Slate-grey eyes and a piece of plastic in his mouth._

_He feels sick and presses the heel of a palm against his forehead._

_He is cold._

_He is hot._

_Not now, he thinks. Not now, not now—_

_Unsure what exactly he is forestalling._

_The air feels charged. Under the off-brown synthetic cotton of the cardigan, the little hairs on his arms stand up._

_“Dr. Rush?”_

_Collision of pressure-waves propagating through a medium. An unexpected intercession._

_In the face of it, the thoughts disperse— but take other thoughts with them._

_Why is he sitting on the floor? Why does he feel so skittish? Why is he swallowing panic at the back of his throat?_

_For some reason he is clutching a fistful of sodden papers._

_The girl is watching him. She asks uncertainly, “Dr. Rush, do you want some help?”_

_Is he Dr. Rush?_

_He is._

_Isn’t he?_

_“No,” he bites out, short with frustration. He forces himself to his feet with a hint of a stagger. He does not know precisely what she had been offering to help with, but he is certain that he does not want help with it._

_“Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”_

_He ignores her and deposits the papers onto the table. There is something written on one of them; he thinks it is in his writing, though his writing does not look like his writing, these days. “You’ll have to clarify the purpose of your evaluation,” he says tightly._

_“It’s not an evaluation.”_

_“Of course it is.” One of his fingertips absently traces a faltering number._

_“It’s cyphertext,” Gloria whispers._

_He flinches violently._

_The girl says, “Dr. Rush?”_

_He has to close his eyes and take a deep breath before turning to face her. “I am not interested,” he says, with as much equanimity as he can muster, “in being evaluated today, Miss Armstrong.”_

_Miss Armstrong. Chloe Armstrong. That’s her name._

_“Okay,” she says, resigned, but with a lingering tinge of worry._

_“What is it you suppose she’s trying to evaluate you for?” Gloria asks._

_“What is it anyone tries to evaluate anyone for?” Rush whispers._

_Chloe’s brow creases. “What?”_

_“Nothing,” he says. He has a headache. “Nothing.”_

_“Giftedness,” Gloria says thoughtfully. “For one. Genetic profile? Potential. Fitness for survival. Experimental success.”_

_This is a very strange set of suggestions, and its articulation makes him feel uneasy. He closes his eyes and rakes his hair back in a jerky, restless motion._

_Chloe is still watching him, with a faintly worried expression._

_“I just— “ Rush says haltingly. “I’m not— I’m just not interested in being evaluated today.”_

He clenched a hand in his hair, breathing shallowly. “Fuck,” he whispered.

“Rush,” Ginn said softly. She was kneeling not far from him, her hands folded in her lap. She did not ask if he was all right.

“ _Fuck_ you,” he said to her, fast and brutal. With effort, he managed to bring his head up and fix her with a hostile look. “You _turned me off_. Didn’t you? With your _computer._ Turning me down wasn’t enough? You had to know; you had to see for yourself if you could just— shut me off entirely. When I became a problem. It was an experiment. Is that it? It was an _experiment.”_

She shook her head. Her face was pale. But she said nothing.

“Yes. _Yes._ _Fuck_ you. I’m not a fucking machine; you don’t get to turn me on and off whenever it’s convenient, just because some other fucking _scientist_ somewhere screwed electrodes into my skull when I was unconscious and couldn’t tell them no; you don’t get to—“

“ _Hey._ ” That was Chloe, her voice clipped and sharp. “You were having a _seizure_. Which, by the way, you caused yourself, so—“

“Then let me have a _fucking_ seizure!” Unsteadily, Rush pushed himself to his feet, bracing himself against the wall. “I’m not a child; I can—“

“You shorted out the neurology building!” Chloe said, her voice rising. “Do you even know that? You blew out all the circuits! With your _mind!_ We had to do _something_ ; the fluorescent light fixtures were popping like— like— like kettle corn, so I’m sorry if we didn’t want to wait for you to actually _light something on fire_ , or—“

“It’s not your fucking business!” he shouted. He slammed the flat of his hand against the wall behind him.

“It _is_ my business, because, guess what: I don’t want to die!” Chloe flung her hair back in what seemed to be a gesture of agitation. “And I don’t want anybody _else_ to die, either! You’re right; you’re not a child; you’re dangerous. You’re like a— a— a weapon! If I saw someone walking around with a bomb strapped to them—“

“Oh, _fuck_ you,” Rush said again. His voice had gone low and hard; it didn’t allow her the option of continuing her sentence. But he didn’t continue, either. His mouth was dry, and he felt unexpectedly light-headed.

_The plan was always to turn you into—_

His hands formed fists.

“Rush,” Ginn said quietly. She hadn’t stood; she was still kneeling on the floor.

He leveled an unsteady finger at her. “No. _You_ can just—“ He could not find the words that would constitute an adequate directive. The frustration choked him; made him feel incandescently violent. “You think— what? That just because you saved me, that gives you some kind of hold over me? That you own me now, and you can do whatever you want?”

“No,” she said. She wasn’t looking at him. The downward tilt of her head made her face look stark and bare. “That is not what I think. Rush—“

“Who the _fuck_ gave you the right, then?” He didn’t wait for an answer. Something was itching under his skin— the scream again, muffled and buried and distorted. “I can’t fucking stand this,” he said. With some effort, he pushed himself away from the wall. He moved forward with a manic jerkiness, a sense of disorientation. He was still wearing his cardigan and jacket, he noticed, but not his shoes. This was inconvenient, because: “I’m leaving,” he announced.

“You can’t leave,” Chloe said. She sounded impatient. “What if the Lucian Alliance find you?”

“Let them find me.” He was looking round for his shoes.

“You don’t even remember who you are. You don’t have any money!”

“I’ll nick a fucking car and sell it on.”

“You can’t just _steal_ a _car!_ ”

“Why not? I’m already a fugitive, as you were good enough to remind me.” Rush located the Converse high-tops and bent to unlace them. His hands were shaking, which made this difficult. “What the fuck do you suppose the American police force is going to do to me that hasn’t been done already?”

Chloe shut her mouth. Her face was pale. But after a moment, she said, “What if you have a seizure?”

“Then there’s one thing the American police force _won’t_ be doing, which is: using a computer program to _shut down my higher mental functions._ ” He punctuated this statement with a particularly vicious pull at a knot.

Chloe strode over and snatched the shoes away from him, which— in spite of a brief and desultory tussle— he proved incapable of preventing. “These are mine. I paid for them,” she said.

Something unpleasant contorted in Rush’s stomach. He ripped off the jacket he was wearing, wadded it up, and threw it at her head. “You paid for that, too,” he said. “You think I need your pathetic, smug-as-fuck fucking Islington Oxfam donations?” He was already attempting to shove the cardigan off his shoulders as well. “I don’t. Fuck you. Have them back.”

Chloe had caught the blazer awkwardly and was holding it crumpled in one hand. Seemingly at a loss, she said, “That’s not what I meant.”

“No? It’s exactly what you fucking meant.” He’d not undone the _fucking_ buttons. He tried to do so, but his hands would not cooperate. He was cold, suddenly, but determined to get the fucking jumper off him. He could not stand this; he could not _stand_ this. He could not tolerate the pettiness of it, when he had been a creature given proteiform shape by the deep flux at the incunabulum of matter, the inchoacy where it was not even matter, or it did not matter if it was matter, because no part of the particulate world had solidified yet.

He could not tolerate it, the everyday humiliations, all the little ways they beat the flinching edges of you that wouldn’t fit, the ways they told you who you were, the ways they made you remember: the cash-up-front-please and the 50p-short-for-a-cup-of-coffee and the way that Gloria’s parents looked at him, as though they could see the coal-and-tar traces where his ancestors clutched invisibly at his shoulders, grasping and leaving marks like bruises with their illiterate fingertips. Had he known all along that a voice was waiting on the dark side of the cosmos; had he sensed it drawing in its breath? If so, it hadn’t saved him. It had made the humiliation more acute.

He surrendered to impulse at last and simply stripped the fucking cardigan over his head. It left his glasses crooked, and his hair like a nest of thistles; he was wearing just an undershirt, feeling cold, cold, cold and sick and exposed, but he was glad he had done it; he was better like this, he thought. Better.

He dropped the garment on the floor. “There,” he said to Chloe. “All your purchases, returned to you. And _you_ —“ He pointed at Ginn, who had stood, but not spoken. She was standing a little behind Chloe, her face angled away. “I want what’s mine, in return. I want the computer program.”

Without much visible emotion, Ginn said, “The computer program is not yours.”

“It’s designed to rewrite my fucking consciousness. How much more _mine_ could it be?”

“I won’t let you have it.” She looked at him then, lifting her head just a little to fix him with her large raw-amber eyes. Some quality of the primordial sap that underlay the resin still made itself felt through them; her gaze was slow, heavy, and seemed to clasp at his shoulders. “You cannot impute that I made to destroy you by using this program under the Alliance, and that I made to destroy you by using it now to the opposite end. It is logically infeasible. It is a faulty definition. There must in this universe be a means by which I act and do not harm you. Can you not imagine such a future? Can you not imagine such a contemporaneity? You _must_ believe that through some recourse I have tried not to harm you, and this is logic, this is _logic_ , that then you must believe there is in me the efficacy to _not harm you_ ; and I am _trying_ to do so, but it is very immeasurately difficult, on account of— of—“

“On account of the fact,” he said bitterly, “that there is no _me_ to not be hurt. You made sure of that. So why won’t you simply let me _be what I am_?”

“I will not let you be nothing,” she said steadily. Her composure was bone-like, brittle. The gemstone quality of her gaze didn’t lift. It came to him that she was a person who did not cry; she would like to cry now, but was not crying. Perhaps the idea had not occurred to her. It was a condition that he recognised intimately and had respect for. But he could not give her what she wanted. He did not know how to be someone. It was a deficiency, he thought; an acquired condition, though he did not know the source of it.

“Fine,” he said. He turned away from her and brought his hands to his temples, where he could feel the foreign touch of the two transmitters, each one no bigger than the head of a pin. “If you won’t give me the program, then allow me to relieve myself of two further items that aren’t mine. Perhaps you can return them to their rightful owner.”

Experimentally, he dug a nail under the edge of one of the transmitters.

The panic in Ginn’s voice seemed to heave its way towards him before her words themselves did. “Rush, no—!”

He wrenched.

* * *

_He turns his face into her lap. The sun is warm against him. He can hear water falling somewhere nearby; smell the wet smell of it, and some breed of flower that is familiar— Mediterranean, maybe— but not_ quite. _It is a pleasant smell, and it is pleasant for him to lie here, half-cradled by her, whilst her fingers sort gently through the tangles in his hair. He would know her hands anywhere: the neat short nails, clipped to the quick since childhood, and the curious callouses on the leftmost fingertips; the small scar on the meat of the palm where a pet rabbit had bitten her when she was seven. She had never trusted rabbits, after— or, more generally, pets. “It was my discovery of other minds,” she’d once told him. “How mysterious they can be. You can never know what they’re thinking, not really; you can never really understand why they bite.” “Preparing you for me,” he’d said. She’d known what he meant; she’d known, by then, that he_ could _bite, and had been the recipient of it more than once. She had reached out and fondly straightened the skewing line of his glasses. “Yes, for you. My other mind,” she’d said._

_He closes his eyes and has to breathe shallowly for a moment. The sudden desolation that grips him is intense. “I don’t know how to be someone without you,” he whispers._

_She flicks him lightly on the side of the head. “Well, that wasn’t very wise of you, was it? Poor planning.”_

_“Everything’s gone wrong.”_

_“We can make it right again.”_

_“I don’t—“ His voice collapses. “I don’t know if we can.”_

_“Shh.” She rests her hand against his forehead. Her skin is very light and cool. “Don’t you realise where we are?”_

_“The courtyard.” He can tell without even opening his eyes. There is a certain feeling to it that he can find no words for, as though he is at the center of all things, or the beginning of time._

_“Yes.”_

_“Is it real?”_

_“What do you suppose Sheppard would say?”_

_“Sheppard,” Rush says vaguely. He is not certain that he remembers someone named Sheppard. Like the smell of the flowers, the smell of the wet stone, it is both familiar and far away from him._

_“We love Sheppard,” she says._

_“Do we?”_

_“Don’t we?”_

_He feels confused, light-headed. “I suppose,” he says uncertainly. “I don’t really remember.”_

_“That’s all right,” she says. “You’re a little bit broken, darling. But it’s only temporary. Do you know what happens to a caterpillar inside of a chrysalis?”_

_He shakes his head. It hurts; his head hurts, and he doesn’t know why. “Please,” he whispers. “Is it all right if I just lie here for a little while? I get such terrible headaches, lately.”_

_“Of course. Of course you can,” she says. Her voice is fond. She tucks a lock of hair behind his ear. “And I’ll sing to you.”_

_Drowsily, he says, “Yes; I’d like that.”_

_Then there is music. But it is not the music that he was expecting. It does not sound like singing, though it is not unpleasant. There is something between a piano and a bell; something hollow and resonant and bluish, as though it is made of glass or ice; then metallic chimes in octave intervals, or— octave is not the right word, or not really, as more than eight notes make up each complete span. He knows this scale. He knows this musical system. He knows this_ music _. He cannot think why it ever seemed confusing to him. It is his home; it is his native language; it is the language that he has always felt himself to lack. When he opens his mouth, searching for words; when his brain locks into its own voltage; when he pounds his fists against some interior door—_ this _is the speech that his body wants to utter, the speech that he will speak and speak like a string pulled up from the maze of his body, the speech in which he will never have an accent._

_But_

_It_

_Is_

_Loud_

_And he cannot hold so much noise within him._

_He hasn’t got room for it all._

_“I can’t,” he says, agonised, digging his fingers into his temples. “I_ can’t. _”_

 _“You_ can _,” Gloria says relentlessly. “You were made for this, Nicholas. Just_ breathe.”

* * *

“Breathe,” someone says. “Just breathe.”

“Rush?”

“His heart rate seems steadier now.”

“But he does not _awaken!_ ”

“Maybe you need to give him a minute.”

“What if he is damaged?”

“I don’t know.”

“Rush? Rush, can you hear me?”

“I don’t think he can hear you.”

* * *

_“Listen.”_

 

 _crotchet restsimma5simma5resh4resh4ot4ot4 immat4immat4ot4ot4resh4resh4ot4ot4_  
_crotchet restsimma4resh3 ot3 immat3 ot3 resh3ot3_  
_crotchet restcrotchet rest resh2 crotchet restimmat2crotchet rest resh2crotchet rest_  
_crotchet rest {simma5,simma4} {resh4,resh3} {ot4,ot3} {immat4,immat3} {ot4,ot3} {resh4,resh3} {ot4,ot3}_

 _crotchet restsimma5simma5resh4resh4ot4ot4 immat4immat4ot4ot4resh4resh4ot4ot4_  
_crotchet restsimma4resh3 ot3 immat3 ot3 resh3ot3_  
_crotchet restcrotchet rest resh2 crotchet restimmat2crotchet rest resh2crotchet rest_  
_crotchet rest {simma5,simma4} {resh4,resh3} {ot4,ot3} {immat4,immat3} {ot4,ot3} {resh4,resh3} {ot4,ot3}_

 

_“Do you understand? Do you see how it fits together?”_

 

 _crotchet restsimma4simma4simma4simma4crotchet restsimma4simma4ot4ot4resh4resh4 simma5simma5_  
_crotchet restsimma3 simma3crotchet restsimma3 ot3 resh3simma4_  
_crotchet restcrotchet restsimma2crotchet restsimma2 crotchet rest resh2 crotchet rest_  
_crotchet rest{simma3,simma4} {simma3,simma4)crotchet rest{simma3,simma4}{ot3,ot4} {resh3,resh4} {simma4,simma5}_  
_crotchet restquaver rest esp6quaver rest esp6 crotchet restquaver rest esp6ot6 resh6quaver rest esp6_

 

_“You must bring these two things together in your mind.”_

 

 _crotchet restsimma4simma4simma4simma4crotchet restsimma4simma4ot4ot4resh4resh4 simma5simma5_  
_crotchet restsimma3 simma3crotchet restsimma3 ot3 resh3simma4_  
_crotchet restcrotchet restsimma2crotchet restsimma2 crotchet rest resh2 crotchet rest_  
_crotchet rest{simma3,simma4} {simma3,simma4)crotchet rest{simma3,simma4}{ot3,ot4} {resh3,resh4} {simma4,simma5}_  
_crotchet restquaver rest esp6quaver rest esp6 crotchet restquaver rest esp6ot6 resh6quaver rest esp6_

 

_“Bells and time. Bells and—“_

* * *

_Grudgingly, he has agreed to smoke on the doorstep, as Chloe will not allow him to smoke in the house. It is the Fifth of November. The Fifth of November, ci-devant Bonfire Night. In between mouthfuls of smoke, he says the words to himself, considering: “The Fifth of November. The Fifth of_ November. _The Fifth of November. The Fifth. The Fifth.”_

_Remember, remember the Fifth of November._

_But he doesn’t._

_He pushes his glasses up his face, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes. Catherine wheels go spinning against the insides of his eyelids. Remember._

_He is six years old, with a sparkler in his hand._

_He is energetic. He moves in the darkness, shedding sparks everywhere he goes._

_He is a spark. He moves in the darkness. He hurtles towards the other half of the circuit._

_He is like a slip of comet bridging the slender difference of two stars._

_He is burning himself out._

_He is six. He is a spark. He is slipping on the cobbles. He is shoving his NHS spectacles up the bridge of his nose._

_He is sipping from a glass full of stars at a cocktail party. He is waiting for someone to get him out of here. But no one will, because he has not met her yet._

_Fireworks like fish in the night water while he fucks his tutor, or rather—_

_Roman candles. Catherine wheels. A shuttling-through of neuronal activation._

_He is in America, ash crumbling from his cigarette onto the grass._

_He wrestles a hand through his hair, watching the light die over the Washington, D.C. rooftops. Is he remembering, or is this real? He can overhear the hum of the television. Ginn is watching a marathon of yet another dreadful American programme. He thinks that if he were remembering, he would understand what to say to stop her, because one is always able to solve the problems of the past, isn’t one? If he were remembering, he would understand what to say to fix her, and he would understand why she needs to be fixed. But he doesn’t. He has only the knowledge that she is broken, and a sourceless ache to see that she is all right._

_“Tell me,” he whispers to the darkness. “Tell me what I have to do to fix it. Tell me how to remember.”_

_Things can be retuned. They can be returned._

_A sparkler in his hand._

_Catherine wheels._

_The images come disattached from any meaningful context. They are splinters from the tree trunk of the past. They lodge in his flesh, and do not offer any solace._

_Gradually, the stars begin to come out overhead._

* * *

_He is in the dark, but he is not alone._

_No one is in the dark with him, but he knows that somewhere in this world is another— another organism, another sentience— because a noctilucent thread is tied to him, knotted so far back in his chest that his own hands cannot reach it._

_He would like to untie the thread, but he can’t, so he sits in the dark and wonders vaguely what exists on the other side._

_He has a limited ability to imagine it._

_He could pull on the thread, and he thinks that perhaps he has done so, like a bell-rope, at other times and when he was other hims. But now he is afraid— not that no force beyond the darkness might answer, but that it would, and that he would have to rise and retrace the very long path that he has been walking, and that the person who emerged from the maze might not be the same who had gone in. Might not even be a person._

_What would happen if he refused? He pictures himself hauled out kicking and struggling, a blind and recalcitrant cave-creature, sick with the shift in pressure and shaky-limbed. He would rather be alone, he thinks. He would rather die in the trenches, in the maze-Marianas-trenches in which he makes his home. If it comes to it, he could rip the thread out of his fucking chest, or chew it off with his teeth. He’s done worse damage. Other people have done worse damage, and he’s survived it. It’s a point of pride. You should always know what you’re capable of surviving, what you will endure to prove that you are worthy to live._

_But he doesn’t do any of these things._

_He is very tired._

_He sits in the darkness._

_Quietly, hesitantly, questioningly, he curls his fingers around the thread._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains quite a few literary references: to Gerard Manley Hopkins's "I am like a slip of comet" and Blythe's _Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village_ , as previously, but also T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Shakespeare's _The Tempest_ and _Hamlet_.


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